
Class _LA-:L5^ 
Book .&_ 



Copght'N". 



COPYRICm' DEPOSIC 



THE 
AMERICAN COLLEGE 



I :« 



THE 
AMERICAN COLLEGE 



A CRITICISM 



BY 



ABRAHAM FLEXNER 



."V^^^f 




NEW YORK 

THE CENTURY CO. 

1908 



LIBRARY of CONGRESS 
Tv/o Copies Received 

OCT 22 1908 

Copyncfit Entry 

CLASS CL. ^^c, No, 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 1908, by > p~ 

The Century Co. 



Published October, 1908 



TO 
JOHN M. ATHERTON 



CONTENTS 

Chapter Page 

I. The Problem Defined .... 3 

II. The Development of the College 22 

III. The College and the Secondary 

School 60 

IV. The Elective System . . . .116 
V. Graduate and Undergraduate . 157 

VI. The Way Out ...... 215 



Vll 



PREFACE 

This book is based on an educational 
experience of almost twenty years, in 
the course of which I prepared many 
pupils for college; I tried also to ob- 
serve their development during and 
after their college careers. Subse- 
quently I spent two years as graduate 
student at two different American uni- 
versities, and something above a year 
in England and Germany, where I en- 
joyed opportunities for observation. 
I have, moreover, frequently compared 
notes with teachers in secondary 
schools, colleges, universities and pro- 
fessional schools, whose experience has 
been in some respects fuller and more 
ix 



PREFACE 

direct than my own. But as their com- 
munications were made in confidence, 
I am compelled to forego the support 
which they would lend to the argument. 

Abraham Flexner. 
New York, June 20, 1908. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 



I 



THE 
AMERICAN COLLEGE 

CHAPTER I 

THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

PROPOSE in this book to discuss the 
American college in its educational 
aspect. In taking this standpoint, I 
do not mean to imply that a college 
experience ought properly to contain 
nothing but what is explicitly or tech- 
nically educational. I do mean, how- 
ever, to intimate strongly that now- 
adays the college puts the emphasis in 
the wrong place; that incidental and 
sometimes irrelevant elements in col- 
lege experience dominate the essential 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

and fundamental educational purpose. 
I want to make this essential and fun- 
damental purpose prominent in my dis- 
cussion. For that reason I survey the 
field from the educational point of 
view. There is, I fancy, no danger 
that college life will too strictly confine 
itself to the same limitation; or that 
proper emphasis of the educational mo- 
tive will altogether wither college 
charm. That charm is, at bottom, 
largely a matter of youth and the sit- 
uation; it is not merely the product of 
triviality. Oxford life, for example, 
is not the less Oxford life at Balliol, 
where a high plane of intellectual seri- 
ousness has been long maintained. 

I propose then, to analyze the educa- 
tional procedure of the American col- 
lege ^ from the moment when it tells the 

iThe term "college" is so loosely employed in 
4 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

secondary school how the boy is to be 
made ready for his collegiate oppor- 
tunities, to the day when the Bachelor's 
degree indicates that the entire process 
is successfully finished. Eight years 
have elapsed; during the first four the 
college has directed, during the last 
four completely controlled, the plastic 
boy. Does the outcome bear the im- 
press of a clear, consistent and valid 
purpose ? Does the thing prove as edu- 
cation to have been worth while? 
These are the points at issue. 

this country that it is necessary for me to indicate 
the sense in which it is used in these pages. I have 
in mind institutions (1) requiring for admission the 
equivalent of a high school course; (2) offering the 
student a considerable variety of elective courses; 
(3) frequently seeking to provide opportunities 
for advanced work. The indiscriminate use of the 
terms college and university in America is exhaus- 
tively and lucidly discussed in the Second Annual 
Report of President Henry S. Pritchett, of the 
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of 
Teaching, pp. 66-99. 

5 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Our college authorities are them- 
selves far from happy. They dwell 
complacently on rapidly increasing 
numbers, splendid "plants" and the un- 
checked flow of benefactions; but 
there is considerable uneasiness just 
below the surface. The pilots are ap- 
parently not sure as to whither to steer ; 
at times they steer for several ports at 
once; again, for no particular port at 
all. "So far as I have been able to 
ascertain through twenty-five years of 
the discussions of the Harvard board, 
of which I have been a member," says 
Mr. Charles Francis Adams,^ "the au- 
thorities are as wide apart now as ever 
they were. There is no agreement; no 
united effort to a given end." To the 
same effect, President Schurman of 

1 Phi Beta Kappa address, Columbia University, 
June 12, 1906. 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

Cornell has recently declared:^ "The 
college is without clear-cut notions of 
what a liberal education is and how it 
is to be secured, . . . and the pity 
of it is that this is not a local or special 
disability, but a paralysis affecting 
every college of arts in America." 
The conviction that the reforms which 
converted the narrow academy into the 
"wide-open" university have not made 
good, is indubitably gaining ground.^ 
Profound scepticism as to the educa- 
tional possibilities of the average boy is 
the not uncommon consequence: here 
are laboratories, libraries, lecture 

1 The President's Report, Cornell University, 1906- 
7, page 20. 

- "Notwithstanding the fact that the American col- 
lege is the most characteristic feature of the Amer- 
ican system of education it shows to-day weaknesses 
which its best friends clearly recognize." Second 
Annual Report of President Henry S. Pritchett, Car- 
negie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, 
p. 80. 

7 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

courses, calculated to meet every con- 
ceivable demand; an unheard-of ac- 
cumulation of opportunities and re- 
sources ; and to how little avail ! Well, 
it must then be impossible! The aver- 
age boy is simply not educable. It is 
useless to repine. The capable fellow 
gets an education, the others get some- 
thing. This is the instructor's state of 
mind a few years after the institution 
of a system recommended by the dia- 
metrically opposite course of reasoning. 
For the elective system was in effect a 
profession of confidence in the actual 
capacity and probable seriousness of the 
average boy. It assumed that he pos- 
sessed ability and might be led to de- 
velop purpose. Yet in the face of its 
attempt to enlist his energy in congenial 
effort, the college finds itself forced to 
a low standard. A degree may be won 
8 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

with little or no systematic exertion. 
High rank is obtained with less effort 
than ought to be required to maintain a 
minimum grade.^ Of course there are 
exceptions; but the significant fact 
stands out, that no considerable per- 
centage of students even try for honors, 
in spite of the fact that they are sup- 
posed to pursue studies for which they 
care and which they are going to need. 
Teachers in graduate and professional 
schools complain that college gradu- 
ates of three-and-twenty are in general 
"thoroughly unripe"; that a college 
degree is far from a safe guarantee 

1 "The average amount of work done by an under- 
graduate in a course is less than three and a half 
hours a week outside the lecture room; more than 
half the answers from which these results are de- 
rived came from men who obtained the grade of A 
or B" (highest grades). Report of Harvard Com- 
mittee on Improving Instruction, p. 4. There are 
no reasons for believing this true only at Harvard. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

of a sufficient knowledge of the funda- 
mental branches pursued in college 
with explicit reference to subsequent 
professional study/ And our college 
students are just as lacking in spontan- 
eous and disinterested intellectual ac- 
tivity as in more strictly instrumental 
power and efficiency. 

Comparisons are, of course, always 
dangerous; but I venture to declare 
without fear of contradiction that in 

1 These statements are partly based on the obser- 
vation and judgment of a number of eminent scien- 
tists and professional men, engaged in advanced 
teaching, who have kindly favored me with a candid 
expression of their experience. They are practically 
unanimous in holding that the college graduate is 
neither a trained nor a serious worker. It is sig- 
nificant that almost without exception they speak of 
him as "settling down" in the professional school. 
Two of my correspondents sent me carefully com- 
piled statistical comparisons which indicate that it is 
decidedly doubtful whether a college education of the 
type now in vogue gives a boy any professional ad- 
vantage at all over the graduate of a good High 
School. 

10 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

point of scholarship and trained capac- 
ity the American college graduate of 
three-and-twenty is sadly inferior to the 
German student, some three years 
younger. For the present, I am less 
concerned to explain this fact than to 
get it distinctly admitted. How far 
the college is responsible, we shall con- 
sider later; what offset ought to be en- 
tered on the other side of the ledger is 
just now immaterial. The important 
thing is to realize that the American 
college is deficient, and unnecessarily 
deficient, alike in earnestness and in 
pedagogical intelligence; that in conse- 
quence our college students are, and 
for the most part, emerge, flighty, su- 
perficial and immature, lacking, as a 
class, concentration, seriousness and 
thoroughness.^ 

1 Every statement in this paragraph is abundantly 
11 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Does this mean that the American 
boy lacks intellectual capacity or that 
the college simply does not engage it? 
I hope to prove that the latter is the 
case; that at each of the critical junc- 
tures of the boy's education the college 
fails in pedagogical insight. I con- 
tend that we are not yet justified in con- 
cluding that the American boy cannot 
as a rule be highly trained; or that the 
best we can do is to coax him to polish 
up a bit, while, as an inducement to 
submit so far, he is abundantly divert- 
ed and amused. It may be, of course, 
that after all we shall have to accept 
this depressing outcome ; but not at any 
rate until a more intelligent, systematic 

sustained by the correspondence referred to in the 
preceding note. I may also quote further from 
President Pritchett's Report: "The two objections 
generally brought against the college to-day are 
vagueness of aim c'.nd lack of intellectual stamina." 
(p. 80.) 

12 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

and fearless experiment has also ended 
in an equally negative result. 

Meanwhile certain college apologists 
endeavor to escape the evidence of their 
senses by statistical demonstration of 
the saving virtue of a college educa- 
tion. Professor Cattell neatly closes 
this source of comfort. ''The statis- 
tics," he says, "which show that college 
graduates are more likely than others 
to succeed in certain professions, are 
not in themselves significant. One 
might as well argue for compressed 
feet, because Chinese women who fol- 
low the practice are more likely than 
others to marry Mandarins. The ablest 
and most energetic men have gone to 
college, and the college has been the 
normal gateway to certain careers." ^ 

Equally beside the mark is the argu- 

1 Science, Sept. 20, 1907. 

13 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ment from success in business. In 
some cases, the successful business man 
of college antecedents, merely steps 
into his father's shoes; in which event 
one is at most warranted in saying that 
a college education has not made the 
succession impossible. On the whole 
there is no proof that college-bred busi- 
ness men are more effective than the 
men who have worked up from the 
ranks. The change that frequently 
transforms the college graduate in his 
early business years suggests to me 
quite a different view : it is the pressure 
of practical life, making a man of the 
college dilettante. The college leaves 
him "soft"; he has had no such disci- 
pline, no such biting realization of con- 
sequences as one gets out in the rough 
and tumble of the world. The hard 
conditions of survival there jolt him 
14 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

roughly, suddenly, but beneficently. 
Practical life with its intense, narrow 
urgencies binds up the shattered per- 
sonality, focuses the dispersed energies. 
Say what one will of the world's sordid- 
ness, it is a God-send to these vagrants 
of the higher life. 

It is, however, not impossible to ad- 
mit its failure and still to acquit the 
college of all substantial blame. Those 
who take this position grant that the 
college is inefficient and distracted. 
But, they urge, it could not be other- 
wise : the stream can rise no higher than 
its source; our American life is itself 
distracted; mad in the pursuit of ma- 
terial ends. In reply, I point out that 
the attempt to make society the scape- 
goat loses sight of powerful and equally 
characteristic tendencies in other direc- 
tions. We are by no means wholly 
15 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

abandoned to material ends and low 
standards; and the college might fair- 
ly be asked consistently to express and 
uphold those extant ends that are not 
material, those struggling standards 
that are not low. Now, as a matter of 
fact, the college does not even rise to 
the accepted standards of the commer- 
cial world, to whose demoralizing in- 
fluence its scholarly ideals are occasion- 
ally alleged to have succumbed. For 
college standards of success are actual- 
ly below those that prevail outside. A 
youth may win his degree on a showing 
that would in an office cost him his desk. 
Unquestionably certain features of 
American life make trouble for the 
schools; but is it not just as true that 
this same life provides education with 
unparalleled opportunities? An edu- 
cation condemned to a formal and 
16 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

sterile routine might hesitate under ex- 
isting circumstances to compete with 
outside attractions. But formahty 
and routine attach to education to-day 
only so far as education chooses to re- 
tain them. They are needless ; they are 
alien. Our life fairly tingles with the 
romance of activity. Science, industry, 
libraries, cheap books, cheap transpor- 
tation, close contact with social and in- 
ternational problems — all make grist 
for the school mill. To no previous age 
has such a variety of interests been so 
accessible. The society which has put 
such material, such stimuli at the service 
of the school-master, has given him far 
more than it has taken away. 

Finally, there are critics who see in 
the situation only the breakdown of the 
effort to modernize the college curric- 
ulum. Their remedy is a retreat: "the 
2 17 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

resuscitation of the all-around man 
through the compulsory study of Latin 
or Greek to the day of graduation." ^ 
Such a proposal ignores altogether the 
reality, and validity of the factors that 
destroyed the old-fashioned college. 
The classical curriculum went to pieces, 
because it had long since served its pur- 
pose. It cannot be put together again ; 
the suggestion is utterly futile. An 
arbitrary discipline of the classical type 
is enforceable only where it has an ade- 
quate sanction in social regard, and a 
real point of discharge in the social or- 
ganization. Men must believe in it; 
something must depend on it. This is 
still to a considerable extent the case in 
Germany. There they believe that a 
training in the classical languages ac- 
tually matters, that the classical disci- 

1 Adams, Phi Beta Kappa address. 
18 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

pline does for youth some indispensa- 
ble thing that nothing else can do 
equally well. The schools, the learned 
professions, the government, the family 
still hold more or less together on this 
point. Under such circumstances, a 
prolonged and for some purposes effec- 
tive training can be got out of the class- 
ics. The situation is indeed changing 
in Germany, — rapidly changing, as 
things go there ; but for the present, the 
traditional education is the main and in 
some directions the only door to prefer- 
ment. It is very different with us ; the 
conditions under which the classics can 
be made the basis of a prolonged disci- 
pline simply do not exist here. We 
do not believe in their disciplinary effi- 
cacy or necessity; nor are we likely to 
be persuaded of it. Nothing tangible 
depends on Greek and Latin ; they lead 
19 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

nowhere. There is no conviction — 
social, professional, official, strong 
enough to sustain their use as the back- 
bone of the educational system: hence, 
the futility of our classical instruction. 
But there is another and even deeper 
objection to the proposed revival of 
Greek and Latin in this role. Sheer 
discipline, whether of the classical or 
any other kind, cannot give us the type 
of educated man that modern society 
wants. I say it leads nowhere; it does 
not connect individuals with concrete 
opportunities. I do not mean this 
formula to exhaust the province of col- 
lege education; but so much at least a 
college education must do. The clas- 
sical discipline can take no account of 
this central fact. It goes its way re- 
gardless of particular situations. It 
tends therefore to the over-production 
of educated men whose training leaves 
20 



THE PROBLEM DEFINED 

them high in the air without a para- 
chute to get to earth in.^ 

My argument, therefore, contem- 
plates not the abandonment, but the 
completer working-out of modern edu- 
cational tendencies. The new insight 
is indeed fragmentary and unorgan- 
ized; but it is on the right track. It 
aims to vitalize education; to bring the 
boy's powers to bear; to connect the in- 
dividual with life. Our part is not to 
antagonize a movement so clearly sound 
and inevitable, but having grasped its 
purport, to assist its complete realiza- 
tion. 

1 It is perhaps needless to point out that I do not 
mean to discriminate against the classics as perma- 
nent and fruitful objects of mature study. Else- 
where I have said that, in this respect, they "take 
their chances with the rest." Here I simply deny 
that the classical grind accomplishes what it is 
theoretically expected to do. Fortunately the fate 
and currency of classic thought are in no wise de- 
pendent on the compulsory learning of the rudiments 
of Latin and Greek Grammar by successive genera- 
tions of reluctant boys. 



CHAPTER II 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

THE American college is not, like 
the common school, indigenous 
to American soil. It did not spring 
up to meet a native need. It was im- 
ported to meet a need that the colonists 
brought with them. Hence, a conserv- 
ative, not an adaptive institution, it 
bound the emigrant to his past. This 
it was designed to do. The settlement 
of the New World was not, indeed, un- 
dertaken in an experimental spirit. 
With rare exceptions the colonists 
were not pioneers in a speculative sense. 
They were troubled with no doubts as 
to what was true and right. They 
22 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

merely sought a place to maintain, be- 
lieve and practice an already fully ar- 
ticulate creed. It was soon observed 
that transplantation into a strange en- 
vironment threatened Puritanism with 
dangers, insidious and unforeseen. 
The absence of persecution operated to 
loosen the inner bond; moreover, 
pioneer life was not without novel temp- 
tations from the outside. The college 
was set up in order to resist these ten- 
dencies; to secure the type; to renew 
and fortify the old English Puritan ; ^ 
and it played no insignificant part in 
establishing the breed, despite native 

1 "After God had carried us safe to New England 
and we had builded our houses, provided necessaries 
for our livelihood, reared convenient places for God's 
worship, and setled the civill Government, one of the 
next things we longed for and looked after was to 
advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, 
dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the 
churches, when our present ministers shall lie in the 
dust." New England's First Fruits. 

23 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

forces working in the opposite direc- 
tion. 

Its conservative office the college 
continued to discharge amidst fairly 
congenial conditions, almost to our own 
times. The gradual expansion of the 
curriculum, in the meanwhile, betoken- 
ed no radical enlargement of horizon. 
Increasing complexity of life, progres- 
sive amelioration of manners, made law- 
yers and gentlemen almost as necessary 
as clergymen. The college supplied 
them. They were cast in pretty much 
the same old die; at any rate, imbued 
with pretty much the same old spirit. 
The necessary extension of discipline 
was effected, without fundamentally 
altering its point of view. In course 
of time the college became somewhat 
more human, somewhat more gracious, 
somewhat broader in scope and interest, 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

but hardly less conservative. It still 
looked mainly to the past. 

In the last half century, however, 
this situation has markedly changed. 
Two factors, science and democracy, 
have completely transformed our at- 
mosphere and ideals. So congenially 
have these two forces been engaged 
throughout the western world in the 
task of reconstruction, that the connec- 
tion between them seems too deep for 
accident. Their conquests have, of 
course, not been altogether easy. Hab- 
its, vested interests, institutions — 
among them, the college itself — stub- 
bornly resisted change. Direct action 
upon social and political machinery and 
ideas thus soon developed definite limi- 
tations. Reform, after all, amounts 
merely to poking the fire from the top. 
Attention was then, somewhat tardil}^ 
25 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

directed to education, which had hith- 
erto followed conventional lines. The 
fire must be poked from below. Edu- 
cation gets in this way a creative and 
adaptive function, in reference to a new 
social and intellectual ideal. It ceases 
to be the bulwark of creeds, — philosoph- 
ical, scientific, theological, — ^whose doom 
has been pronounced. The schools no 
longer furnish asylum to ideas that can- 
not maintain themselves in the open. 
They become, instead, engines for the 
completer subversion of the passing or- 
der, for the more thorough diffusion of 
light and air. This transformation of 
the schools has not been everywhere 
equally rapid and complete. It has 
been bitterly antagonized at some 
points in Germany; in England, the 
fate of the Public Schools and the an- 
cient Universities is still involved in 
26 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

grave doubt; it is still a question how 
far they will lend themselves to current 
needs. The American college was 
summarily required to make a decisive 
choice; to readjust itself or to go by the 
board. A variety of needs, many of 
them in conflict with its traditions, and 
all going far beyond them, had to be 
cared for. For a time the college re- 
sisted, at least retarded, the movement; 
in the end, to save itself, it executed a 
right-about. American college his- 
tory has been made rapidly since 1870. 
The general causes, common, as has 
been pointed out, to the entire western 
world, have been in this country acceler- 
ated by local influences. Here a vast 
population but recently freed from dis- 
ability of one sort or another found it- 
self in a highly favorable environment 
just at the moment when science was 
g7 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

suggesting to industry quick and eif ac- 
tive methods of turning the situation to 
account. In its turn industry has re- 
paid the laboratory by testing its con- 
clusions and propounding new and stim- 
ulating problems. But educational in- 
terest has by no means confined itself to 
the physical sciences. The same eager 
spirit has penetrated other realms; it is 
re-writing history, re-conceiving social 
theory, working-out a nearer and more 
cogent standpoint in philosophy. All 
this many-sided activity comes to a 
focus in the college. The curriculum 
struggles to embrace every topic of se- 
rious intellectual or practical concern; 
it calls for all possible varieties of in- 
dividual capacity and preference. The 
reconstructive function of the college 
is still further emphasized by the de- 
velopment, in close connection with the 
^8 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

college, of graduate schools, borrowing 
the technique of research perfected in 
Germany, and largely devoted to the 
discovery and circulation of new truth. 
The contents of college instruction are 
thus, like the waters of a mountain 
lake, always in process of fresh re- 
placement. The college can never 
again be restricted to conservation of a 
hard-and-fast type, individual and so- 
cial. It has become one of the main 
agents of progress and change. 

Structurally the college that now ac- 
commodates interests so various con- 
sists of a large number of highly spe- 
cialized and separate departments, each 
striving to be more or less completely 
representative of its own field: a de- 
partment of physics, a department of 
classics, a department of history, a de- 
partment of mathematics, etc. They no 
29 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

longer all revolve around a central sun; 
they do not even freely intersect. 
Rather, the several departments lie side 
by side, of equal dignity with each 
other. The entire structure is capped 
by professional and technical schools of 
law, medicine, engineering, agriculture, 
etc. One or another of these features 
may be absent or rudimentary; but all 
together they form the structural ideal 
towards which the American college 
unmistakably strives. 

The changed significance of the B.A. 
degree tells this story in detail. Forty 
years ago the Bachelor's degree con- 
veyed a specific and practically invari- 
able meaning. There was one narrow 
path to academic confirmation; every 
candidate had to traverse it. Perhaps 
the college graduate did not expect to 
be a lawyer or a clergyman; he had, 
30 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

however, to be content with an educa- 
tion strictly relevant only to these two 
learned callings. A cultivated man was 
one who, whatever his ignorance or lim- 
itations in other directions, had enjoy- 
ed a liberal education of this descrip- 
tion. The classics were the back-bone 
of the college curriculum; they were 
supplemented by the cut and dried phi- 
losophy and rhetoric then current, some 
mathematics and bookish science, and 
an occasional dip into modern litera- 
ture. To a limited extent, the individ- 
ual was even then permitted in a few 
colleges to modify this scheme; but, in 
general, the bulk of the instruction was 
the same for all. Its spirit was unmis- 
takably rigorous and partial. As 
against this uniform and unambiguous 
procedure, it would nowadays tax the 
ingenuity of a professional mathema- 
31 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

tician to calculate the number of study- 
combinations that qualify for the B.A. 
degree. The Bachelor's degree now in- 
dicates simply three or four years of 
study in some line or lines appropriate 
to some intellectual concern or other. 
On the face of the diploma there is 
usually nothing to show where in the 
wide universe of science or scholarship 
the individual's preference lay.^ He 
may have adhered closely to the tradi- 
tional classical scheme; or he may have 
entirely ignored the humanities in favor 
of physical science; or he may have ig- 
nored all the sciences but one ; or he may 
have cultivated philosophy or modern 
literature; or finally he may have made 
a sort of gentlemanly ''grand tour" 

1 A few colleges confer different degrees (B. Sc, 
B. Lit. etc.); but each of these is still quite vague. 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

through the capitals of the chief prov- 
inces of intellectual interest. 

An analogous transformation has 
somewhat more tardily and less radical- 
ly taken place in Germany. I have 
pointed out that essentially the same in- 
fluences are at work there as here: so- 
cial democracy and scientific industrial- 
ism. Between them they have largely 
reconstructed an institution far more 
refractory than the American college. 
For the classical gymnasium long en- 
joyed a legal monopoly: it was the only 
door to a professional career. A bitter 
struggle with many ups and downs has 
at length deprived it of its exclusive 
privileges. Three paths have been cut, 
where there was formerly only one : the 
Realgymnasium with Latin and no 
Greek, and Realschule with neither 

3 aa 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Latin nor Greek, stand nominally in re- 
spect to subsequent opportunities on al- 
most the same footing as the historic 
classical gymnasium.^ The German 
scheme is of course more guarded and 
less flexible than our elective system; 
but it proves the acceptance of a similar 
view of the business of higher educa- 
tion in modern society. "The schools," 
says Paulsen,^ "cannot tear themselves 
loose from the general march of cul- 
ture. Classical study formed original- 
ly the entire content of all higher train- 
ing ; in the nineteenth century, however, 
it necessarily declined into simply an 
essential element in this training. The 
time is coming — and the most recent 

1 1 say "nominally" because a powerful caste feel- 
ing still operates in favor of the classical gymnasium. 
Similarly in the English Public Schools the " classical 
side" enjoys distinct and effective social prestige as 
against the "modern side." 

2 Das Deutsche Bildungswesen, p. 139. 

34 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

ordinances indicate this point of view 
—when it will not even be regarded as 
a necessary ingredient of a liberal edu- 
cation." 

Pedagogically, this development 
means that higher education which 
formerly derived its goal and chief ma- 
terial from humanistic culture is now 
coextensive with the reach and interest 
of intelligence. Mentally and socially, 
culture in the narrow sense was an aris- 
tocratic conception: mentally, because 
of its marked predilection for literary 
and artistic forms of activity and ex- 
pression; socially, because it detached a 
learned class. The old-fashioned col- 
lege of limited scope and fixed curric- 
ulum thus made sharp distinctions of 
dignity and value within the intellectual 
field; its emphasis was aesthetic. 

Now, by way of contrast the modern 
S5 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

college is impartial, catholic, demo- 
cratic. Its concern is the whole field; 
its responsibility and duty to society at 
large, not to a certain section thereof. 
It embraces therefore all types of intel- 
lectual capacity, all the characteristic 
processes and activities of social expres- 
sion and growth: science, industry, 
trade, laws, institutions are its objects 
not less worthily than art, literature, 
philosophy. It makes no question of 
precedence among them; amid con- 
ditions where all are badly needed, it 
holds it idle to indulge arbitrary pref- 
erences; wasteful and disturbing to in- 
terfere needlessly with the natural out- 
let of the youth's energy, by a sort of 
academic "protective tariff" that tempts 
or drives him into an uncongenial ex- 
pression. The list of things socially, 
hence educationally, worth while thus 
36 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

extends indefinitely : truth, beauty, yes ; 
but equally, comfort, health, wholesome 
food, well-governed towns with pure 
water and clean streets. Higher edu- 
cation covers the entire social field, and 
not merely a detached portion. Its 
problem is the effective exploitation of 
the individual on the basis of this varied 
social opportunity and need. The edu- 
cational premium on particular forms 
of endowment has disappeared; the in- 
ducement to particular forms of ex- 
pression has been withdrawn. More 
and more the college takes its cue from 
the individual himself. It means to 
discern significant tendencies in him, to 
convert these into actual power. Edu- 
cation is no longer a formal discipline, 
but rather a concrete device to facilitate 
the assertion of individual capacity in 
terms of rational activities. This is the 
37 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

serious significance of the extended 
scope of the American college and of 
the elective system ; this, the meaning of 
libraries, laboratories and museums con- 
stantly multiplying and enlarging. 
The college has come down from the 
mountain; it dwells among men. 

The outcome of a successful educa- 
tion on these lines is not approximation 
of the individual to a pre-conceived type 
of culture, but primarily his appro- 
priate and effective orientation in 
society. The conception is thoroughly 
democratic. The student's destination 
is motived from within; there are no 
arbitrary obstacles to congenial self- 
realization; there is no vocational 
stigma. The sole criteria are social 
need in the first place, adequate scope 
for the individual in the second. The 
thing is to secure the f rictionless rise of 
38 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

the individual to his level. There he 
means most to society, and life means 
most to him. The modern college un- 
dertakes to create the conditions in 
which this result may take place. So 
far as its resources permit, it slights 
nothing: it provides preliminary train- 
ing indiscriminately for lawyer, doctor, 
clergyman, technician, scholar, mer- 
chant. Whatever the verdict passed on 
the efficacy of the educational appli- 
cation, nowhere else have American en- 
ergy and intelligence achieved a more 
solid result than in this widening of 
the scope of higher education, in this 
frank recognition of the culture value 
and dignity of science and the useful 
arts. 

The transformation which I have 
now described has occurred in all char- 
acteristically American institutions to 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the extent that their resources have per- 
mitted them to take part in the move- 
ment. Lack of means rather than dif- 
ference of pedagogical aspiration or 
principle distinguishes as a rule the col- 
leges that remain closer to the point of 
origin. Even as it is, uniformity in 
certain respects already practically pre- 
vails. The entrance requirements are 
about identical; the elective system is 
well nigh universal; and colleges too 
poor to maintain a regular graduate de- 
partment still like to entertain a few 
graduate students. The general drift 
is therefore towards the type exempli- 
fied by the radical and comprehensive 
institutions. Among them it seems to 
me impossible to discover any far- 
reaching pedagogical variations. They 
exhibit no considerable or significant 
|)eculiarities of range or structure. 
40 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

Differences of age between them count 
for comparatively little. The older 
foundations all necessarily developed 
along similar lines; while the most re- 
cent, though enjoying a free hand, have 
been in the main content to reproduce 
what they found at the moment in pos- 
session of the field. These latter insti- 
tutions started up complete; hence they 
could entertain no deep-seated doubts; 
try no extensive or novel educational 
experiments. They assumed that, on 
the whole, "whatever is, is best," sacri- 
ficing, as it seems to me, the tremendous 
opportunities that in a scientific age be- 
long to the country and the institution 
that have no history. In consequence, 
they have increased the quantity rather 
than changed the quality of the col- 
lege output. To the same category be- 
long certain institutions, long retarded 
41 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

by poverty, which have employed the 
increased resources suddenly received 
in recent years in uncritically repro- 
ducing the college type developed in 
the Eastern states. Fortunately local 
conditions have to a certain extent di- 
versified their activities; but their insti- 
tutional ambition has been much too 
largely absorbed in tl\!e endeavor to rival 
or duplicate that which it would have 
been far more wholesome to reconsider.^ 
Even in a fresh field, like the college 
education of women, where the absence 
of a traditional or conventional struc- 
ture created an ideal opportunity for 
experiment, we have escaped the em- 

1 Decidedly the most promising novelty is Prince- 
ton's preceptorial system, which I notice more fully 
later (p. 207). The University of Chicago offers 
certain original features (e.g. its four continuous 
terms, the distinction between Junior and University 
Colleges), but it can hardly be said that as yet any 
definite results have been realized from them. 

4^ 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

barrassments of freedom by devolving 
upon girls the education that has proved 
of doubtful fitness for boys. An as- 
tonishing degree of sameness, an aston- 
ishing lack of experimental originality, 
mark the entire situation. College 
pride affects indeed to discriminate 
nicely between the Yale and Harvard 
man, the Vassar and Wellesley girl. 
We need not take this sort of thing 
seriously. These subtle distinctions 
may be safely ignored. The only sig- 
nificant marks to be observed are trace- 
able to individual teachers. Here and 
there a strong man breaks through and 
makes a permanent impression on the 
students who come under him. But 
this phenomenon is quite consistent 
with general institutional uniformity. 
The rough but effective tests of life 
discover no essential differences in 
43 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

training, type or capacity in the college 
product. 

I do not mean of course to overlook 
altogether such differences as actually 
exist. It is worth while to examine 
here how far they extend. Harvard, 
Cornell, Michigan are, for instance, 
pronounced and unequivocal, Yale and 
Princeton more conservative, in atti- 
tude. The latter have moved less rap- 
idly, though in the same path. No col- 
lege has permanently resisted the char- 
acteristic modern tendencies ; no college 
has revolted; no college has proposed a 
radically distinct conception or solution 
of educational problems. The differ- 
ences reside not in the things done, but 
in the length to which they are carried. 
Harvard and Michigan have evidently 
enjoyed being thoroughly modern; they 
manifest no regrets. Yale and Prince- 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

ton have followed in the same proces- 
sion at a somewhat irregular pace. 
They have not wanted to stay behind; 
they have failed to discover a more sat- 
isfactory alternative route; they have 
only gone more slowly, — at heart, un- 
convinced, I suspect, and as I shall try 
to show, in some respects justifiably un- 
convinced. When, for instance, Har- 
vard introduced the elective system, its 
action showed the courage and the joy 
of conviction: it really introduced it. 
Yale compromised. The Yale system 
is halting, piecemeal, a grudging at- 
tempt to make an old-fashioned cur- 
riculum melt imperceptibly into the 
elective scheme. But the difference be- 
tween the two is not a difference of 
principle. When the Yale system gets 
into full swing, it is practically just as 
unorganized, just as innocent of con- 
45 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

trolling educational purpose as the Har- 
vard system, even though it lacks the 
Harvard abandon at the start; it is not, 
in a word, redeemed by its tardiness or 
its few external checks. 

So again, as regards the relation of 
college and secondary school, Har- 
vard's attitude is clean-cut; a sharp 
horizontal line divides the two. The 
moment the boy crosses the dividing 
line, he enters a different world ; the line 
is drawn straight across. At Yale and 
Princeton they draw the line obliquely; 
the required studies of the high-school 
project into the college, and there 
break off one by one. But the differ- 
ence is not educationally profound; it 
matters little how the line is drawn, 
whether horizontally or obliquely. All 
these institutions are equally in error in 
their conception of secondary educa- 
46 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

tion; alike they draw a line, where na- 
ture intends a web. 

It will have been observed that I 
speak of the college and of that alone. 
I intend thus to discriminate the col- 
lege as such from the additions and de- 
velopments that have converted it into 
a university. My business is with the 
college, as a place for the final training 
of boys, not with the entire system of 
special or advanced schools that cluster 
about or spring from it. I do not now 
question the wisdom of the policy that 
from mere colleges developed our pres- 
ent universities. But I wish to empha- 
size strongly the view that this devel- 
opment has neither destroyed the re- 
sponsibilities of the college nor shifted 
them to some other quarter. These re- 
sponsibilities have indeed become great- 
er, just by reason of the heavier super- 
47 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

structure that now rests upon the col- 
lege foundation. The heart of the uni- 
versity is the college. No separate 
department can work well if that heart 
works ill. The ultimate integrity of 
university performance depends on the 
way the college attends to its proper 
business ; that business constitutes in al- 
most every instance, historically and 
practically, a first lien on the resources 
of the institution.^ 

With the technical, graduate and pro- 
fessional departments which belong to 
the American university we have there- 
fore no concern, except in so far as 

1 The exceptions are institutions like the Johns 
Hopkins, Leland Stanford Jr., the University of 
Chicago, Bryn Mawr, the resources of which have 
never belonged to the college alone; as their graduate 
departments were established at the very beginnings 
they stand in this matter on the same footing as the 
college. 

48 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

they react upon the college. They 
grow out of the college ; they lean on it. 
But at no point is anyone of them 
identical with it. The work of the col- 
lege is done, when their work begins. 
For them the college has a specific task 
to do; they set up — each of them — cer- 
tain objective requirements that col- 
lege training must satisfy. Of course, 
it must do something more, too. Its 
duty is not confined to the preliminary 
grounding of prospective lawyers, doc- 
tors, and archseologists, each in the ele- 
ments fundamental to his own career. 
But the point I now make is, that even 
in reference to the career in which a 
subsequent discipline is continuous with 
college work, though the two some- 
where merge, they do not coincide. 
The isolation in which I propose to dis- 
4 49 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

cuss the college is no mere abstraction; 
it is fair to the actual facts; it is essen- 
tial to clear thought. 

A brief consideration of the chief 
products of the advanced schools 
will make this point evident. Out 
of material, supposedly shaped up 
by the college, the law school makes 
lawyers. The end is definite, prac- 
tical; the means, direct and concrete. 
That method is preferred which 
attains the desired result most ef- 
fectively. There lies the virtue of the 
case system — a system which cuts loose 
from formal text -books and distills the 
juice of typical cases. From the first 
the student is in contact with actual is- 
sues, with court process, with trial ma- 
chinery: every principle is concretely 
embodied in illustrative fact. The case 
system trains lawyers, — not jurists. 
50 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

Jurisprudence in a comparative or phil- 
osophical sense cuts no figure. A high- 
ly trained and resourceful legal intel- 
ligence immediately available in the 
courts or the office issues from the law 
school. The clinic, the laboratory, an 
adaptation of the case method, achieve 
a similar result in medicine. It does 
not follow that our best professional 
schools despise the scientific or philo- 
sophic spirit or expect the individual 
to go ahead without it. The truth is 
that, for the time being, they assume 
the free scientific and philosophic dis- 
cipline as done. They take for grant- 
ed a certain division of labor. The re- 
sponsibility for a training that under- 
lies every form of specialization, that 
relates the individual career with the 
civilization in which it is enveloped, be- 
longs — so the professional school as- 
51 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

sumes — to the college. There is no 
question of any considerable overlap- 
ping here. 

Similar considerations eliminate the 
graduate school too from the present 
discussion. Superficially, its relation 
to the college seems more intimate. It 
does not start abruptly, like the law 
school, for instance. It continues col- 
lege pursuits, — with a difference: 
breaking them up, refining upon them. 
There are few graduate occupations 
that do not thus run straight back to 
undergraduate roots. Nevertheless, 
despite continuity of subject matter 
there is a decisive change of attitude. 
The two departments are really com- 
missioned to do two entirely different 
things. Take their respective attitudes 
in reference to a particular interest, — 
say, history. The undergraduate en- 
52 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

ters college with a meagre outline ac- 
quaintance with ancient history or the 
history of England and the United 
States, not necessarily — and hence rare- 
ly — both. The tasks of the next few 
years are quickly set: the teacher's, to 
stimulate interest, develop connections 
and relations; the student's, to increase 
his knowledge of the facts, to cultivate 
an inclination to construe social prob- 
lems largely and sympathetically. In- 
cidentally, something may be done to 
initiate the beginner into methods and 
technique; but — and this is nowadays 
so apt to be forgotten! — never at the 
expense of the main business of college 
history teaching. Now, the graduate 
student has presumably left this stage 
behind him. He is supposed to know; 
to be able to survey the field at large. 
Hence he betakes himself off to some 
53 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

unoccupied corner: there he delves for 
ore or fossils. His interest is mainly 
critical and productive. Technique, — 
at best an interesting incident to the un- 
dergraduate, introduced by way of 
stimulating interest or promoting intel- 
ligent judgment of evidence — is every- 
thing to the graduate investigator. 
Whether he is to search forever or some 
day to become a mere teacher, according 
to current conception of what becomes 
a graduate student, his main business 
for three years is microscopic, — and in 
conclusion a thesis, making as much as 
possible of it. I do not undertake to 
say whether this dispensation is wise or 
unwise: the point is that it is at least 
distinct from the sort of thing that is 
cut out for the undergraduate. 

From the educational standpoint, 
then, the graduate school is on the 
54 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

plane of the professional schools. Its 
concern is equally definite, special, 
practical. The graduate school trains 
specialists, as the law school trains 
specialists. It makes no essential dif- 
ference that its specialists are scientists 
or scholars, instead of lawyers. Mere 
remoteness from so-called practical life 
is beside the point. After all, that is 
something one can never be certain 
about; the most abstruse and disinter- 
ested researches may astonish us by cut- 
ting straight across the common routine 
of daily life! Some chemical dreamer 
will one day drop a grain of starch into 
the housekeeper's lap! However this 
may be, the discipline of the scholar is 
as narrowly conceived as that of the 
lawyer in reference to its end. That is 
the decisive point. The relation of vo- 
cation or interest to training is the 
56 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

same; the presupposition in reference 
to previous education is identical. 

The point at which the professional 
schools part from the college can then 
be distinctly marked on the map: it is 
the point at which the student as such 
becomes of less importance than the 
pursuit as such. Of course neither ele- 
ment need ever entirely disappear. 
The objective aim furnishes content, 
stimulus, standard to the boy; the hu- 
man element has an adapting role to 
play, when science is severest. But the 
difference in emphasis is nevertheless 
so pronounced that the entire com- 
plexion of education changes between 
the college and the later schools. 
Throughout the college the student is 
prospective man, not simply prospective 
professional man; in the graduate 
schools the student as individual prac- 
56 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

tically ceases to count: there the stand- 
ards, demands, ideals, are pitilessly ob- 
jective. 

Between the attitude and resources 
which I have now described and the col- 
lege product as characterized in the pre- 
ceding chapter, a startling incongruity 
appears. It strikes one with fresh 
force whenever one turns from the col- 
lege outfit or catalogue to the concrete 
manifestations of college life. The 
two somehow do not fit. On the one 
side, a formidable array of scholars and 
scientists, libraries, laboratories, publi- 
cations; on the other, a large, miscel- 
laneous student body, marked by an 
immense sociability on a common-place 
basis and widespread absorption in 
trivial and boyish interests. How are 
we to account for the disparity ? Clear- 
57 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ly the college fails to enlist a respectable 
portion of the youth's total energy in 
intellectual effort; either its sincerity 
or its pedagogical intelligence is dis- 
credited by the occupations and diver- 
sions which it finds not incompatible 
with its standards and expectations. 
It is easy to say that these by-products 
are the causes of pedagogical ineffi- 
ciency; but it is obvious on reflection 
that they must be equally its results. 
Once started, indeed, they develop rap- 
idly on their own account, steadily en- 
croaching; but they could not have 
started, had the college had definite 
aims, enforced through an adequate ed- 
ucational procedure. Hence, badly as 
administrative vigor is required, it is 
alone far from meeting the fundamen- 
tal need. It is comparatively simple 
to extirpate those who appear to be the 
58 



DEVELOPMENT OF THE COLLEGE 

weaker brethren; but it is not a whit 
more intelHgent than to pull every ach- 
ing tooth. 

I shall endeavor in the following 
chapters to analyze the express peda- 
gogical pohcy of the college at each of 
the critical junctures of the boy's edu- 
cation in the hope of reaching the ulti- 
mate causes of the discrepancy between 
what the college undertakes and what it 
achieves. 



59 



CHAPTER III 

THE COLLEGE AND THE SECONDARY 
SCHOOL 

A STUDY of the educational effi- 
ciency of the college necessarily 
includes the preparatory school in 
which the college is really the control- 
ling stockholder. The connection is 
inevitable; a supply of fit material is 
thereby ensured. Whatever the con- 
tract which the college undertakes, its 
fulfillment within the appointed time 
depends, in the first place, on the ability 
of the preparatory school to deliver the 
necessary raw material in the right 
shape. Now, that there may be no 
question, the college practically de- 
60 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

prives the sub -contractor of discretion/ 
Its specifications — ^the so-called en- 
trance requirements — are full and pre- 
cise; it reserves the right by means of 

1 It is true that the College Entrance Board is 
made up of representatives of both colleges and 
secondary schools; but this Board is an examining 
board only: it has absolutely nothing to do with 
determining the entrance requirements of the several 
colleges. It simply conducts examinations in the va- 
rious subjects forming the college entrance lists. The 
entrance requirements were arranged by the colleges 
themselves long before the Board was thought of 
and in all essential respects remain now what they 
were then. Various conferences have, indeed, from 
time to time suggested modifications of detail that 
have been generally adopted; but nothing of funda- 
mental importance has thus been achieved. Besides, 
the colleges still largely maintain their own separate 
examinations, in which the secondary schools have 
no part whatsoever; the colleges accept the College 
Entrance Board examinations as equivalent to their 
own. Further: in making up the Board questions, 
the college influence strongly predominates; each set 
of questions is prepared by a committee, to which 
the colleges contribute two representatives, the sec- 
ondary schools one. Unquestionably the Board has 
been the means of eliminating a good deal of capri- 
cious and needless variation. On the whole, however, 
their examinations are not free from the objections 
urged in this chapter to a system of examination by 

61 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

entrance examinations to reject every 
proffered candidate failing to conform 
to them. There is no question as to 
this domination in case of the academy 
expressly devoted to college prepara- 
tion; how stands it with the high 
schools? Now, I do not deny that the 
independent high schools, at present our 
most vigorous and valuable agencies of 
secondary education — originally influ- 
enced the colleges powerfully. They 
first created the "modern side"; in a 
measure, their popularity forced the 

an external and necessarily mechanical agency. As 
long as the College Entrance Board remains such an 
agency, it cannot fundamentally aifect matters. This 
is practically admitted by the Secretary in his Sev- 
enth Annual Report (1907, p. 44): "as the number 
of candidates examined by the Board increases, the 
quality of the average candidate's preparation is 
steadily deteriorating." The Board has, on the other 
hand, possibilities in other directions; and once in- 
fected with a more experimental and genuine ped- 
agogical spirit, might become the means of radical, 
even if gradual, reform. 

62 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

colleges to accept modern subjects on a 
par with the classics and mathematics. 
So far the colleges surrendered to the 
high school; but subsequent moves 
have reversed the situation. The def- 
inite collegiate formulations of what is 
wanted in each subject have reacted on 
these schools, practically determining 
for them the spirit, method and con- 
tents of their instruction. A specious 
line of argument is thus costing the 
high schools the freedom they used so 
well; there is only one right way, say 
the colleges, of teaching a subject, 
whether the boy is going to college or 
not. The high schools assent; in the 
next moment, the college defines that 
one way; and its control threatens to 
become just as complete and pedantic 
in the domain of science and modern 
languages, as it has always been in the 
63 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

classical realm. A strong and wholly 
regrettable tendency has thus developed 
in the direction of accepting the college 
entrance requirements as conclusively 
marking off the proper sphere of sec- 
ondary instruction and as authorita- 
tively prescribing how this work ought 
to be carried on. 

The two institutions are thus essen- 
tially subject to one authority, or, more 
correctly, the secondary school, at least 
so far as it aims to prepare boys for 
college, is now largely controlled by the 
college and in its interest; despite 
which, as we shall see, they do not 
organically fuse. Beyond the sec- 
ondary school, the college has not yet 
sought to pierce. The elementary 
school has not yet been brought within 
the college "sphere of influence." The 
college makes no demand on the second- 
er 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

ary school which compels the second- 
ary school in its turn to influence 
elementary education. In conse- 
quence, the elementary school has en- 
joyed some freedom for experimenta- 
tion. There is a place in it for zeal, 
originality, enthusiasm; there alone a 
purely educational interest finds scope. 
In the high school there is less and less 
room for pedagogical initiative; there 
never has been much in the college. 
Hence elementary education, though 
chargeable with certain crudities and 
absurdities, has shown the capacity to 
profit by its own mistakes; it has un- 
deniably advanced, and that, without 
pressure from above. 

This is the initial pedagogical blun- 
der of the college ; it unwittingly snubs 
elementary education. It so defines 
and applies its admission requirements 
5 65 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

that their fulfillment becomes wholly 
a matter for the secondary school with- 
out reliance upon, or organic connection 
with, the elementary school. Utter 
waste of the earlier school years does 
not militate against entering college; a 
wise use of them does not help the can- 
didate, whose fate is wholly dependent 
on literal compliance with terms that 
can be best met by cramming a few 
years just before entering college. As 
a matter of fact, the early years are of 
the most vital consequence to an educa- 
tion that proposes the exploitation of 
the individual on native lines. Such an 
education must begin early; the ulti- 
mate fullness and definiteness of indi- 
vidual life are conditioned on seizing 
and utilizing the instincts as they go 
by. The tiny rills must be protected 
near their source, their channels cleared, 
66 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

if they are ever to form a clear stream, 
instead of losing themselves in a vague, 
oozy marsh. Now, of the child the 
college takes no notice — direct or 
indirect — during the fruitful and 
fateful years, when the instincts open, 
tarry for a moment, then close unsatis- 
fied and disappear. Thus the first 
break in education takes place; child- 
hood is detached; to be neglected, if it 
so happens; in any event, not to con- 
nect organically with the really digni- 
fied stage that opens when the serious 
business of college preparation begins. 
But whatever its omissions in respect 
to elementary education, the college 
appears by its assumption of control to 
appreciate its essential continuity with 
the secondary school. In the matter 
of this control a distinction may be 
made between the more conservative 
61 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

colleges — (Yale, Princeton) — which 
practically insist upon a fixed and uni- 
form course of preparatory study and 
the more radical institutions, (Har- 
vard, Columbia, Michigan, Cornell) 
which permit a limited amount of 
choice. The distinction does not go 
beyond a narrowly limited choice of 
studies; in the teaching of the subjects 
chosen none of the colleges allow the 
least latitude. That, as we shall see, 
is everywhere determined by the minute 
prescriptions of the college catalogue, 
backed up by the entrance examina- 
tions. We are not, therefore, to under- 
stand that in one case the preparatory 
school is fettered, in the other, free ; the 
difference is only that the conservative 
colleges fetter the preparatory school 
from start to finish; the radical col- 
leges put on the same fetters, after 
68 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

allowing a choice between certain alter- 
natives. 

The unfitness of the rigid and uni- 
form preparatory course, prescribed by 
the conservative institutions, may be 
readily demonstrated. Indeed the 
very arguments and considerations that 
have led them to loosen up their own 
curricula apply with equal or greater 
force to the secondary period. I have 
said that the college controls the sec- 
ondary school in order to make sure 
that it will get what it needs. What 
then does it need? In the first place, 
the boy must be in secure possession of 
a certain amount of knowledge. We 
shall assume that the required prepara- 
tory course assures this. Now, under 
the old regime, in which a fixed college 
course followed a fixed preparatory 
course, this was perhaps enough: the 
69 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

boy who had learned in the secondary 
school the elements of Latin, mathe- 
matics, etc., could enter college classes 
in the same subjects and proceed with- 
out break or jar. But now that the 
elective system is practically universal, 
the possession of a certain amount of 
knowledge is insufficient. Neither 
knowledge of the prescribed rudiments, 
nor the discipline supposedly attained in 
the course of acquiring this elementary 
acquaintance, equips the youth to meet 
the novel responsibility laid upon him 
by the elective system. He has hereto- 
fore studied one set of subjects; sud- 
denly the elective system requires him 
to select and organize for himself an 
appropriate and probably very diiFer- 
ent set. He has had to study for four 
years Latin, Greek, mathematics: how 
does this enable him to find his way 
70 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

intelligently in totally distinct realms 
of activity and interest? How does it 
help even to locate the realm in which 
he is to be at home? Under the elective 
system, whether in the outright form, 
in use at Harvard and Michigan, or 
in the restricted form in vogue at 
Yale and Princeton, the main value of 
preparatory education must turn upon 
the help it affords the student in the 
emergency^ upon which the outcome of 
his college education depends: the one 
question is now — has he been so trained 
that he can and will make a series of 
intelligent and rationally connected 
choices ? 

The hard and fast preparatory 
school combination leaves this problem 
untouched. It affords the student no 
chance to disclose the capacity or to de- 
velop the purpose upon which shortly 
71 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the college is going to presume; it 
requires the secondary school teacher 
to be a drill master, without responsi- 
bility for the liberation or definition of 
the pupil's significant tendencies. 
Under the most favorable conditions 
these tendencies are ignored ; under less 
favorable conditions they are actually 
suppressed. The plan we are consider- 
ing thus fails to effect an organic con- 
nection between preparatory education 
and college opportunity: it is thor- 
oughly illogical and unscientific. 

The other type, — ^more radical, en- 
deavors to avoid this rupture by extend- 
ing the region of choice backward into 
the preparatory school. It is very 
rightly held that if the college student 
is to undertake the conduct of his own 
subsequent education, he must have pre- 
viously developed a guiding conscious- 
72 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

ness of his own line. He must be 
headed the right way; he must be able 
to take his bearings ; he must be trained 
actively to handle himself in a concrete 
situation rather than just passively to 
"learn." This is the indispensable pre- 
liminary to the efficient operation of 
any sort of elective system, the very 
least that the college can require of the 
secondary school. 

Now, in order to enable the second- 
ary school to locate the individual and 
to carry forward his development on 
appropriate lines, the radical colleges 
have made away with the traditional 
curriculum imposed indiscriminately 
on all alike. They have substituted 
for it a considerable range of choices 
from among which a curriculum adapt- 
ed to their purpose, can, it is supposed, 
be framed. Does this scheme, plainly 
73 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

devised as a basis for the elective sys- 
tem, accomplish what it intends? I 
shall try to show that its flexibility is 
apparent rather than real; it is there- 
fore at this point the less necessary to 
point out that even flexibility will not 
alone solve the problem that the college 
elective system imposes on the second- 
ary school. 

For the purposes of clearness and 
concreteness, I shall discuss from this 
point of view the Harvard entrance re- 
quirements; what is true of them 
applies with practically equal force to 
the requirements of Cornell, Columbia, 
Michigan, and others. 

Thirty-odd subjects covering an ex- 
ceedingly wide field enter into the Har- 
vard entrance scheme; many of them 
are there for the first time accorded 
academic recognition. Side by side 
74 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

with time-honored veterans hke the 
classics and mathematics, newcomers 
Hke music and blacksmithing are made 
at home. To each subject is assigned 
a specific value, estimated in points, ac- 
cording to its difficulty or importance: 
English counts 4, Elementary Latin 4, 
Algebra 2, Music 2, Chemistry 2, etc. 
For admission, a total of 26 points 
must be secured. Here, then, one 
might say, is abundant elasticity; even 
should the boy enter the preparatory 
school unexplored or untrained, aim- 
lessness must there cease: for Harvard 
imposes a definite task on secondary 
education and provides an organizable 
curriculum whereby to attain it. 

Alas, it does no such thing! Closer 

inspection discloses the fact that what 

one hand offers, the other withdraws. 

The elective range, within which the 

75 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

school is supposed to accomplish the 
student's continuous and purposeful 
development, is largely nominal. Of 
the 26 points needed for entrance, at 
least 18 are absorbed by studies re- 
quired of everybody alike; that is to 
say, about 70 per cent, of the work is 
rigidly pre-ordained for all comers. 
Prescribed are English, Latin or 
Greek, French or German, Ancient or 
Modern History, Algebra, Geometry 
and one Science. Now, consider this 
conglomeration from the standpoint of 
college need; is it possible to see in it 
any pervading purpose? To what has 
it reference? Certainly not to the as- 
certaining or definition of individual 
power, which the college pre-supposes. 
Nor does it, as a collection, embody the 
elements underlying the general social 
life, and therefore, claiming the war- 
76 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

rant of social necessity. The fact is, 
no rational basis whatsoever can be 
made out for it, either from the indi- 
vidualistic or social standpoint. It is, 
in the main, simply the old fixed curric- 
ulum that is deemed to have been dis- 
placed; an arbitrary, though easily ex- 
plicable, combination of unrelated and 
jarring items: English, for example, 
enters for practical reasons; Latin or 
Greek is a concession to the educational 
Tories ; science, an offset, to placate the 
radicals; and mathematics offers hom- 
age to "drill." Every item is a sep- 
arate scrap; the whole is a patchwork, 
suggesting in its method of composi- 
tion, a political platform rather than a 
rational educational program. 

Nothing better illustrates the illog- 
icality of this curriculum than the dis- 
position it makes of Latin; and what 
77 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

is true of Latin holds also for Greek. 
In the college its study is optional; a 
clear intimation that the college does 
not regard a knowledge of Latin as of 
vital importance in modern life. On 
what ground is it required in the sec- 
ondary school? The stipulated amount 
is not severe enough to constitute a dis- 
cipline; its outcome in knowledge is 
both insignificant and misleading. 
Educationally two courses are open; 
one, that proposed by Mr. Adams, the 
restoration of required Latin or Greek 
to the college, thus securing for it the 
time and continuity necessary in order 
to realize its value as discipline — a step 
involving, of course, a complete aban- 
donment of the present college atti- 
tude ; the other, the excision of the pres- 
ent futile fragment from the prepara- 
tory school, where it obstructs a reor- 
78 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

ganization of the curriculum on vital 
lines, and accustoms the pupil to low 
standards and evasion. If the classics 
are to furnish a valuable or essential 
discipline, their pursuit must be genu- 
ine and prolonged; if, on the other 
hand, the secondary school is to under- 
take to organize the boy around impor- 
tant personal and social activities, the 
classics must take their chances with 
other subjects. Of the two alterna- 
tives here presented, the latter, in my 
judgment, embodies the correct prin- 
ciple, and at any rate is alone consistent 
with the modern idea. From the time 
when Latin ceased to be compulsory in 
the college, its days in secondary educa- 
tion were numbered. That it still sur- 
vives must be ascribed partly to vague- 
ness of conception, partly to lack of 
courage, both of which have co-oper- 
79 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ated in making up this required list. 
It is true that 30 per cent, of the 
student's energies is not yet bespoken. 
If not impossible, it is very improbable 
that the choices left will be employed 
to contrive a coherent curriculum. The 
purposelessness of the required group 
encourages dispersion. The boy still 
needs seven or eight "points." He 
does not have to choose them in har- 
mony with that portion of the required 
subjects that represents his real pur- 
pose; for so far he has been under 
no constraint to uncover or develop a 
purpose. Instead, therefore, of now 
at last concentrating the residue of his 
energies at a significant point, nothing 
prevents him from using his remaining 
choices to spread himself still farther 
and this is precisely what happens : "ac- 
quaintance with a hundred things and 
80 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

mastery of none," "flabby inefficiency," 
"loose vagueness and inaccuracy" — in 
such terms Prof. Miinsterberg frankly 
describes the incoming Freshman,^ 
whose training has been dictated by 
and has conformed to the entrance re- 
quirements. The reason is plain. 
The boy has already been shattered; 
dispersed among a variety of arbitrary 
tasks, that cannot be made to play upon 
each other, to bend to him, or to connect 
with actual experience. It is impos- 
sible at the last moment to introduce a 
principle of unity into an inherently 
structureless scheme. The prescribed 
studies determine the entire situation: 
time, energy, interest are lacking to 
redeem it. For the most part, there- 
fore, no fight is made ; the exigencies of 
the school curriculum, the boy's con- 

1 Science, Sept. 20, 1907. 
6 81 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

venience, decide the "free" choices. 
Incidentally we may remark, in leaving 
this aspect of the subject, the college 
here pays a penalty for its neglect of 
elementary education: what is valuable 
in its prescribed requirements belongs 
of right largely to the earlier stages 
and could be there much more effect- 
ively achieved. Thus the open space 
in the secondary school might be consid- 
erably enlarged. But such a transfer 
cannot be effected so long as the college 
holds the latter to its instructions 
through a system of examinations that 
necessarily impoverish elementary and 
congest secondary instruction. 

One can guess the answer of the col- 
lege to this criticism: the required 
studies constitute the backbone which 
holds the thing together. Wipe them 
out, follow the optional system to its 
82 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

logical conclusion, and you have as 
many curricula as you have boys. A 
school becomes a collection of atoms, 
flying apart, like a freely expanding 
gas. 

That a common substratum must be 
laid, I agree ; that the entrance require- 
ments furnish the needed substratum, 
I just as unhesitatingly deny. An 
education that proposes to mediate be- 
tween realizable individuals and the en- 
vironment conditioning their realization 
has in the first instance to ask what are 
then the indispensable stipulations that 
the environment makes: these must con- 
stitute the vertebral column of the edu- 
cational system. Can the ingredients 
of the required list fairly lay claim to 
such a warrant? A list, which leaves 
it open to an educated man to remain 
totally ignorant of the institutions and 
83 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

history of his own country, in case he 
prefers to learn an outhne of the 
history of Greece and Rome! Nor is 
he in the whole course of his college 
education under the slightest constraint 
to repair this defect. Backbone an 
individualistic scheme must undoubt- 
edly get; but the existing entrance re- 
quirement is not a rational attempt to 
supply one. 

So much for the contents of prepara- 
tory education; by its next step the 
college clips still more closely whatever 
elbow-room it may have left. The stu- 
dent, having pursued for four years his 
studies on the lines described, must 
finally be put through a series of writ- 
ten examinations which decide his fit- 
ness to go further.^ The question 

1 Certain institutions accept students partly or 
wholly without examination, provided they are vouched 
for by their secondary schools. The entrance re- 

84 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

arises — how do such tests retroactively 
affect education? 

Be it noticed that, however divergent 
in essence the studies, the examination 
form is ever the same. A specific re- 
quirement is minutely indicated: 
history, within such and such limits, as 
treated in this text book or that; ge- 
ometry, to include the propositions 
named in an official syllabus ; chemistry 
or physics, 40 experiments apiece, each 
of them set down likewise in a syllabus, 
which the college or the College 
Entrance Board distributes gratis; lit- 

quirements are in these cases not less precise, but 
the secondary school is free to work out its own 
teaching and examining methods. Practically, how- 
ever, the preparatory schools have not been in posi- 
tion to do much with this freedom, for their classes 
usually contain boys destined for the regular col- 
lege entrance examinations, and the more definite 
necessities of these students dictate the spirit and 
method of the instruction. I must add that a de- 
cidedly more wholesome relation between high school 
and college exists in certain Western States. 

85 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

erature, reduced to certain specified 
poems, essays, speeches, novels, about a 
dozen and a half in all. The catalogue 
leaves no doubt as to what the candi- 
date must know ; the examinations leave 
no doubt as to how he must know it. 
At neither point has the secondary 
school any option ; it must identify edu- 
cation with passing college entrance 
examinations. On a sharp skirmish 
lasting a few hours on a hot day, the 
entire issue turns. A light verbal 
equipment, capable of being handled 
with agility and plausibility most ef- 
fectually meets the emergency. The 
boy must be able rapidly to turn out 
categorical answers to questions framed 
in one way, whatever the subject 
matter; whether he is expounding 
Burke's speech, Lycidas, the binominal 
theorem, or the Constitution of Sulla, 
86 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

his salvation hangs on smooth, clear, 
brief formulations of pseudo-scientific 
aspect. Contrast this procedure with 
what takes place in the college: there 
the instructor examines his own class; 
nor even with this advantage is the 
student's passing allowed to depend 
altogether on the written examination. 
Frequently it counts only for one-third, 
recitation records and note-books con- 
stituting the basis of the remaining two- 
thirds. 

Now, if in college a written examin- 
ation set by the instructor him- 
self is neither a fair nor an adequate 
method of appraising the value of his 
own students, why should it suffice in 
case of unknown boys under disturbing 
conditions ? Is it not clear that the out- 
come will be to convert the secondary 
school into a cramming-machine? It 
87 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

would be extremely amusing to see 
what would happen, if the tables could 
be turned on the colleges; if, for 
instance, it were proposed to let out- 
siders set the college final examinations, 
mark the papers and award degrees on 
the basis of such examinations alone! 
Or, if graduate and professional 
schools should insist on going back of 
the Bachelor's diploma and holding 
rigid examinations in all the subjects 
in which the diploma is now assumed to 
be a guarantee of competency! 

Two things are at once clear: first, 
the verbal, intellectualistic treatment 
which I have described annihilates 
natural distinctions.^ A homely illus- 
tration will make my meaning clear. 

1 1 have discussed this aspect more fully in two 
papers: The Preparatory School, Atlantic Monthly, 
September, 1904; College Entrance Examinations, 
Popular Science Monthly, May, 1903. 

88 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

Some years ago a distinguished Pro- 
fessor of chemistry was said to have 
described to his class a cooking ma- 
chine, so ingeniously contrived that in 
it a half-dozen or more different dishes 
could be simultaneously prepared. 
The machine worked with a single 
drawback; all the dishes tasted alike. 
This is just exactly what secondary 
school teaching, destined to be tested 
by the entrance examinations does to 
the varied menu that the college 
spreads: all the characteristic essences 
are cooked to death ! The stimulus and 
nutrition that we ought to gain from 
variety are completely sacrificed. On 
their face history, literature, science, 
mathematics, belong to distinct cate- 
gories. Into each of them a character- 
istic aspect of experience has been dis- 
tilled ; each of them is capable of touch- 
89 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ing the boy at a different angle. The 
necessity of working in sharply sep- 
arate fields is itself a violation of the 
wholeness with which experience comes 
to the child. To some extent it may be 
unavoidable ; but examination-necessi- 
ties enormously aggravate the evil. 
The damage is made irreparable when 
all subjects alike are bleached and pul- 
verized in the course of the intellectual- 
istic handling entailed by examin- 
ability. Mathematics lending itself so 
easily to concise and consecutive formu- 
lation is the model to which other sub- 
jects conform. Thus history is re- 
solved into a succession of so-called 
"facts," arranged on the shelf of 
memory in tiny packages, in such wise 
that the right package answers the pre- 
arranged examination signal; literary 
specimens are taken to pieces and 
90 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

ticketed for the purpose of mechanical 
recall; science is a complete abstraction 
from natural phenomena, supposed to 
be re-endowed with life by exactly 
forty carefully designated experi- 
ments, — one more would be needless, 
one less, perilous. 

A few typical questions will make 
clear just what I mean by intellectual- 
izing studies that merit varied modes of 
presentation, and the sterilization that 
ensues : 

In English,^ for example, the candi- 
date is asked to depict Milton's 
"thoughtful man"; to do which satis- 

1 The utter artificiality of the college entrance 
scheme comes out perhaps most strongly in its treat- 
ment of English. It proposes a program that in the 
matter of reading makes no distinction at all be- 
tween boys and girls. The books selected, being de- 
signed for both, suit neither. The requirements in 
English are admirably calculated to put a summary 
end to the love of discursive reading on which in- 
telligence and taste so largely depend. 

91 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

factorily he must know rather than ap- 
preciate II Penseroso, appreciation and 
"knowing" tending strongly to antag- 
onize each other. A thoroughly artifi- 
cial and hence futile effort is made to 
develop power of expression through 
re-vamping the contents of injudi- 
ciously chosen literary texts, instead of 
connecting the art of expression with 
the boy's vital experience outside the 
school room as well as inside every class 
in which he takes part. There is no 
better evidence of the unnatural way 
in which subjects are divorced from 
each other and from the boy's own life 
than the fact that a boy may "pass" in 
English, if he can retell the plot of 
Silas Marner, though every other paper 
he hands in may be close to the verge of 
illiteracy! In chemistry, — to look 
further — the candidate is more con- 
9S 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

cerned to manipulate equations and 
formulae than to observe every-day 
phenomena. As mere knowing suf- 
fices, phenomena are less prominent in 
instruction than the generalizations 
"explaining" them. Finally in history, 
we may suppose the candidate to be 
called on to state the principles of the 
Federal party, which he will have been 
trained to do perfectly without the 
slightest consciousness that frequent 
dispatches from Washington now raise 
again the same old issue. As far as the 
coefficient of reality is concerned, the 
Federal controversy is as pale and re- 
mote as the legislation of Sulla. The 
boy meets the requirements in United 
States history without ever wetting his 
feet in the currents of actual life ! The 
"successful" outcome of preparatory 
education turns thus on literal knowing 
96 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

of dead fact, not on the ability to make 
a varied and appropriate reaction to a 
living experience, — in the realms of 
nature, social life, politics or literature; 
and the coercion which fastens this kind 
of thing on the secondary schools and 
leaves them neither inducement to nor 
margin for intelligent procedure comes 
from the college. 

In the light of these facts, one can 
understand a somewhat startling state- 
ment in a recent annual report^ by 
Dean Briggs: "Of any two subjects, 
efficiently taught for the same length of 
time, one is about as good as another 
and deserves equal recognition in a 
scheme of examinations." For, clear- 
ly, when half a dozen different studies 
have been each purged of its character- 
istic essence by way of preparation for 

1 1901-2, p. 96. 

94 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

examination, then, I grant you, all 
being equally insipid, "one is about as 
good as another." But now that one 
thing is about as good as another, pro- 
vided only it is as efficiently taught for 
the same length of time, why should 
schools be put to the trouble and ex- 
pense of providing a varied diet? If 
all foods masticated for equal periods 
are equally nutritious, is not a chang- 
ing, well-ordered menu a sheer extrava- 
gance? Dean Briggs argues just the 
other way around; if one food is about 
as good as another, why should a house- 
keeper not keep an abundant table? If 
one study is about as good as another, 
why should a school not provide limit- 
less variety? But the argument is 
wholly fallacious. A developing civi- 
lization wants physics, philosophy, 
poetry. It has no way of substituting 
95 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

one for the other; hence, it values them 
alike. Pedagogically, however, their 
value depends on entirely different 
considerations. It is not simply a 
question of how long or how thorough- 
ly a subject has been taught. The 
mere fact that Roman history and 
American history have been taught 
with equal vigor for equal school 
periods does not make it inmiaterial 
which a particular American boy 
knows. English literature and Egyp- 
tian hieroglyphics cannot be made of 
equal value to a high school boy by 
teaching them equally long with equal 
efficiency. There are certain studies in 
respect to which American society 
leaves the boy no option; it is impos- 
sible to substitute anything else for 
them, whether taught with equal effi- 
ciency or greater. There are other 
96 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

subjects the value of which to any indi- 
vidual depends almost wholly on what 
follows. If nothing follows, a year's 
or a half-year's detached study is 
largely a waste of time, a dissipation 
of energy and purpose, no matter how 
admirable the technique of instruc- 
tion.^ It is, I hold, impossible to speak 
of "efficient teaching" on a narrow 
basis that ignores the general condi- 
tions determining the sub-structure of 
education, and that fails to consider the 
importance to the individual of organic 
continuity in training. The curric- 
ulum is not, in a word, to be put to- 
gether out of any elements whatsoever, 
provided only they measure up as equal 
units. A study's value cannot depend 
on the mere tale of the hours during 

1 This is precisely the vice of all disorganized elec- 
tion, as will more fully appear in the discussion of 
the Elective System (Chap. IV). 

7 97 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

which the teacher has hammered and 
the boy squirmed! No fortuitous 
checker-board arrangement will meet 
either the general demand that society 
imposes on all alike or the particular 
purpose for which every boy is nowa- 
days urged to keep up his education. 

I insist then that the college defeats 
itself in advance through its narrowly 
intellectualistic admission machinery. 
Choices were introduced in order 
through appropriate selection to elab- 
orate the individual on characteristic or 
significant lines. Now, that undertak- 
ing is, as far as the secondary school 
is concerned, defeated before it gets 
under way. The purposeful exploita- 
tion of the individual yields to a nar- 
row, monotonous grind. Instead of 
utilizing a variety of resources to fruc- 
tify a fertile field, the teacher must 
98 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

hammer away at mechanized responses. 
Instruction is deficient in body, volume 
and infectious quality. It is thin, 
peaked, anaemic. It leads to the ex- 
amination room and there stops abrupt- 
ly. Everything is done consciously 
and unconsciously to sound the examin- 
ation motif; to discourage the enter- 
prise, the initiative, for which the col- 
lege subsequently cries aloud in vain. 
Let me give an example: A capable 
secondary school teacher, having thor- 
oughly drilled his pupils in traversing 
the beaten path, might be tempted to 
wander with them in search of the wild 
flowers that shrink back from the 
gravelled walks. The thing is not ex- 
plicitly forbidden ; but, as if the teacher 
had not been already sufficiently con- 
trolled or the pupil sufficiently mechan- 
ized, the colleges still further emphasize 
99 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the cash value of examination technique 
by selhng former examination papers 
"in quantities" for use in the class- 
room at "ten cents a dozen." A noble 
employment for spare time, hardly 
won! Of course the pupil interprets 
education as synonymous with success 
in the fine art of passing examinations. 
He quickly develops a strong disinclin- 
ation to undertake work that does not 
count; he becomes a stickler for the 
letter of the law. He holds a stoj)- 
watch over his teacher, as the college 
holds one over him. How is deep- 
seated purpose to be brought to con- 
sciousness, how is peculiar power to de- 
fine itself, in such an atmosphere? 

There is a still more weighty objec- 
tion to letting everything depend on 
rapid-fire written examinations from 
the outside. They act as a sieve 
100 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

through the meshes of which only the 
verbally expert readily pass. The 
entire transaction is in words; rather 
in verbal manipulations, unchecked by 
the severe reference to fact which can 
alone control and vitalize mere speech. 
Other types, visual, motor or what not, 
certainly more numerous than the 
purely intellectual, are severely handi- 
capped. Contrary to the express 
design of modern education, their train- 
ing is attempted primarily and mainly 
through what they are not rather than 
through what they are. They are pen- 
alized for what they cannot do, while 
the word-monger draws usury on his 
fluency. The boys whose processes do 
not readily verbalize, whose inspiration 
comes of contact with a genuine situa- 
tion, who think in deeds rather than 
counterfeit thinking in words, these, 
101 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the really productive types of actual 
life, must not only compete with the 
verbalist in his own field; they must 
translate into smooth phrases the con- 
crete activities inserted in the curric- 
ulum in recognition of interests that 
do not belong to the word-game ; and on 
the translation, not on their competency 
in the original, they are judged. 

The one place where the actual quali- 
ties that cut a figure in life have some- 
thing to do is the athletic field. There 
real difficulties must be met; problems 
in organization, discipline, adaptation 
of means to end, try the boy's endu- 
rance, resourcefulness and executive 
capacity. There intelligence, wit and 
energy find an outlet. The pedant 
who has had to take all sap out of 
school work surveys the animated foot- 
ball field and helplessly deplores the 
102 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

perversity of youth. I believe the folly 
of the schools to be largely responsible 
for the low level at which the boy's 
capacity and interests thus discharge ; I 
believe that a rationally conducted sec- 
ondary school might successfully com- 
pete with, perhaps anticipate, the foot- 
ball field. At any rate the totality with 
which, once given a genuine problem, 
the boy throws himself upon it, is the 
best answer to those who dread lest a 
rational appeal to capacity means only 
pandering to ease. It is exactly the 
reverse; your ineffective curriculum is 
called "hard," because threats and pen- 
alties are together unavailing to tie the 
boy's energy and attention to it. For 
a fictitious "hardness" which is only the 
other side of apathy and evasion, sound 
educational policy would substitute 
genuine difficulties, inherent in actual 
103 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

situations: it would not deny to a child 
that stimulus of reality without which 
his previously "disciplined" elders will 
not raise a finger! Our educational — 
or cultural — resources are thus wid- 
ened, not reduced; at the same time, an 
increased, not diminished, portion of 
the boy's energy is engaged at a high 
level. 

The truth is that while the college 
has after a fashion partially modern- 
ized the preparatory school curriculum, 
it vetoes complete modernization of 
teaching ideals and methods. The cur- 
riculum once made up, the boy must 
submit to it ; he must learn this, that and 
the other; and tell it in writing before 
proceeding further: the good old 
mediaeval way. 

But if the psychological standpoint 
; is valid, a very different relation has at 
f 104 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

the start to be established, as between 
the boy and the course of study. Con- 
sider, for a moment, what a curriculum 
is: each of the subjects of which it is 
composed is a finished abstraction from 
experience for the reflective satisfac- 
tion of already mature minds. Phy- 
sics, chemistry, history, languages, in 
the shape which they assume in text 
books, are logical devices for the con- 
venient analysis and arrangement of 
specially interesting or important 
aspects of experience. Meanwhile the 
experience itself comes to us in complex 
wholes. In»the real world — man's and 
child's alike — various aspects are pres- 
ent in every experience. In the stone 
on which the boy stumps his toe, physi- 
cal, chemical, geological, aesthetic facts 
are fused. The boy's world is emphat- 
ically this world of fused phenomena. 
105 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

In the school curriculum, however, phe- 
nomena have been already broken up 
on logical lines. Chemistry is, for ex- 
ample, an affair of atoms, elements, 
equations, equivalences; where in the 
real world does the child encounter any 
of them?^ Now the present prepara- 
tory school procedure largely ignores 
the necessity of mediation between the 
world in which the boy lives and that 
which he encounters in his text books. 
His actual interests abide in the 
former; the college cares only for the 
latter. A school that aims at an or- 
ganic response must somewhere medi- 
ate between the two, between the crude 
experience of the boy and the abstract 
world of scientific truth. The boy 
must be led to find in his own experi- 

1 Notice that the college requires the boy to study 
chemistry or physics or some other one science! 

106 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

ence the elements out of which truth 
and law are ultimately won; his own 
emotional life must illuminate the ma- 
ture and reflective literary expression. 
Thus only can the school play a vital, as 
against a merely repressive or coercive 
part, in his development. Thus only 
does his education become part of his 
life, — ^the relationship which the modern 
school actually tries to establish. But as 
things are now organized, the boy's life 
runs in one channel; across an impass- 
able line the curriculum runs in another. 
That the two are in origin identical, 
rather that the curriculum is a mere re- 
finement on actual experience, never, of 
course, occurs to the pupil, and rarely, 
if ever, disturbs the teacher. From 
the deadly bifurcation which makes the 
school only an unwelcome intrusion into 
child life, there is no escape so long as 
107 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the academic standards of mature 
scholars determine the performance of 
immature boys. 

I have no wish to exaggerate; the 
college had undoubtedly to deal with 
unsatisfactory conditions. It honestly 
desired to pull the schools out of a veri- 
table slough. But, unfortunately, in 
its campaign for an elevated standard, 
it so completely misjudged the place 
for emphasis that the present condition 
is in some respects more difficult, less 
manageable, and no whit more satis- 
factory than the situation it displaced. 
President Eliot has recently stated ^ 
that "the American secondary schools 
have distinctly lost ground within the 
last twenty years." Partly this is ac- 
counted for by the athletic infection for 
which, by the way, they have the close 

1 Report 1905-6, p. 46. 

108 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

college connection to thank; but it can- 
not be wholly without significance that 
decay coincides exactly with the stiff- 
ening and bracing of the entrance ex- 
aminations. What is one to think of 
the sieve that lets this deteriorated 
material pass through, or requires it to 
deteriorate thus in order to get 
through? What, in other words, is the 
meaning or value of "elevation of 
standard" accompanied by distinct ret- 
rogression? If the retrogression is 
real, the elevation can be only apparent. 
And such is actually the case. The 
standard is elevated on paper. No 
genuine increase of the student's power 
is denoted by it. No consistent or 
fearless effort is made to enforce it.^ 

1 A recognized authority, who read this in manu- 
script comments: "Much more might be said of the 
false paper-standard which no college actually main- 
tains." 

109 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

It is evaded in the first place by ex- 
tremely considerate marking; in the 
second, by frequent admission with con- 
ditions ; ^ and, finally, if neither of these 
loopholes is spacious enough, the candi- 
date may be actually exempted from 
examination altogether 1 ^ 

1 The following table shows the frequency of con- 
ditions in the entrance examinations: 











Condi- 


College. 


Year. 


No. of 
^ candidates 


Passed 
in all 


tioned 

in from 

1 to 5 or 

more 






examined. 


subjects. 










subjects. 


Princeton 


1903 


412 


109 


303 


a 


1904 


378 


132 


246 


Yale 


1904 


422 


176 


246 


" 


1905 


467 


155 


312 


Harvard 


1903 


664 


225 


439 


« 


1904 


710 


223 


487 



The frequency of failure disclosed by the above 
figures must signify that preparatory education is 
on the wrong track. In mere extent, the required 
performance is actually far below the boy's capacity, 
provided this is once- enlisted. The fact which the 
colleges wholly fail tp grasp is- that adolescence is 
wasted as long as it is treated as a mechanical col- 
lege novitiate on the existing terms. 

2 This last statement does not apply to Yale and 

110 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

The college thus admits that the de- 
tails of the preparatory education 
which it prescribes stand in no essential 
connection with what follows in the col- 
lege itself. The preparatory school 
is forced to do one thing; the col- 

Princeton, neither of which admits special students 
without examination. President Eliot (Report 1905- 
6, p. 18) quotes the Committee on Admission to the 
effect "that the existing system of admission by ex- 
amination was too narrow and consequently ineflB- 
cient " in individual cases. The Committee further 
(p. 342) admits "that dissatisfaction with the re- 
quirements has been constantly increasing." Its pol- 
icy is to relieve particular cases by suspending the 
rules. To this way of curing the difficulty I object: 

1. It does not really remove the stigma of failure 
from the boy to the system, though, by hypothesis, it 
is the system, not the boy, that has failed. 

2. It does not restore to the boy the time, energy 
and educational possibilities that he had more or less 
to waste for four years before it was ascertained 
that the things he has been attempting are not really 
vital after all. 

3. It takes no account of the damage inflicted on 
those that "pass." In a word, jf the system is bad, 
it cannot be made good by special exceptions. Some- 
thing much more fundamental and thorough-going is 
imperative. 

Ill 



. THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

lege needs something quite different. 
They are at cross purposes, hopelessly 
so, for lack of experimental oppor- 
tunity within the secondary school. 
The novel problems raised by the neces- 
sity of dove-tailing into the elective sys- 
tem have been solved for — not by — the 
schools in advance of all experience, on 
the basis of easy administrative control. 
Thus secondary education has been 
through and through externalized. 
Our college authorities have organized 
centralized bureaus which are as fatal to 
true educational spirit and innovation 
as the bureaucratic educational minis- 
tries of the continent, though we have 
had to stop short of the protracted se- 
verity which gives the foreign schools 
their unique disciplinary value. Be- 
fore our chains are riveted any more 
tightly, we might pause to reflect on 
112 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

this Continental experience. "Regula- 
tion goes so far that the teacher's initi- 
ative is restricted to the narrowest lim- 
its; he gets his cue not from what is 
here and now possible and necessary, 
but from some hard-and-fast ordinance, 
that is not rendered any more elastic or 
bearable by reason of the fact that it is 
liable to alteration at long intervals." ^ 
In these words, thoroughly applicable 
to us, Paulsen describes the bureau- 
cratic stone wall, against which Conti- 
nental reformers dash themselves in 
vain. The very extravagances of their 
propositions are to be imputed to the 
speculative form to which they are con- 
fined. They can do nothing; experi- 
ment is shut out. We have no govern- 
mental incubus of this sort ; but we have 
contrived something that is rather more 

1 Paulsen, Das Deutsche Bildungswesen, p. 182. 
8 113 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

than equivalent! In consequence the 
teacher of insight, initiative, originahty, 
the teacher who wants to act upon that 
respect for and faith in the individual 
which the college professes, finds no 
congenial opportunity in preparatory 
education. 

Now I submit that our education 
with its many unsolved problems is the 
last field in which this kind of organiza- 
tion is wise or necessary. Its need 
is in just the opposite direction; orig- 
inality, not mechanical restriction, is re- 
quired. In general, the schools are 
more apt to be behind than ahead of the 
age; more apt to hinder than to antici- 
pate progress. Turbulent spirits do not 
turn school teachers ; school routine does 
not develop revolutionists. Of all the 
arts, education is most liable to crystal- 
lize; and crystallization is a danger to 
114 



COLLEGE AND SECONDARY SCHOOL 

be averted, not a tendency to be as- 
sisted, by all the pressure that the com- 
bined colleges can bring to bear.^ 

1 Just as this book goes to press, the Fourth Annual 
Report of President Jordan, of Leland Stanford Jr. 
University, comes into my hands. It contains, with 
much else of great interest, an elaborate Report by 
a Faculty committee, dealing with the subject of this 
chapter. On the point just discussed the committee 
says: "From the first the theoretical attitude of the 
University has been . . . that the high school cur- 
riculum is primarily a problem for the secondary 
schoolmen; that the University, while lending its as- 
sistance by way of advice and insistence upon high 
standards should avoid all intent or appearance of 
dictation." And again: "It was believed that the 
methods and standards of work in the high school 
needed to be changed." And, if I may draw the 
obvious conclusion, such changes must largely be 
worked out by and within the high school. I am 
not, of course, urging that the high school be cut 
loose and left to itself. A real, inner, organic con- 
nection is to be sought, in place of the nominal, arti- 
ficial bond now subsisting. If the need is best con- 
ceived from the standpoint of the college, the solu- 
tion is in the same degree an experimental problem 
for the secondary school. But the whole force of 
my argument is directed against the isolation of 
either; complete and genuine cooperation is de- 
manded; the situation must be comprehended as a 
whole. See Chap. VI "The Way Out." 

115 



CHAPTER IV 

THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

1HAVE shown that under present 
conditions within the preparatory 
school the battle of the elective sys- 
tem must be fought out almost alto- 
gether on college territory; it is there- 
by doomed to failure from the start. 
The time is inauspicious for so sudden 
and serious a responsibility. The con- 
struction of an educational framework, 
calculated to support one's subsequent 
activity in life, is a difficult undertak- 
ing; it means a thorough searching of 
the heart, a judicious weighing of in- 
terests, opportunities, abilities. Now, 
the secondary school training has not 
116 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

tested the youth's endowment; it has 
not matured or defined him. Can the 
situation of the college Freshman or 
Sophomore be safely relied on to in- 
duce prompt and adequate reflection? 
Consider the facts. Several hundred 
boys at the most expansive period of 
life, having just passed through a pro- 
longed and odious drill, suddenly find 
themselves in the enjoyment of com- 
plete freedom of locomotion in an en- 
vironment fairly teeming with distract- 
ing novelties. The recent preparatory 
school cram has not only discredited 
the studies actually involved in it : it has 
compromised mental application as 
such. A marked revulsion from books 
sets in just at the moment when the 
college substitutes an easily satisfied or 
evaded standard for the exacting daily 
recitation and the threatening entrance 
117 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

examination; at the moment when aca- 
demic freedom tears the youth from his 
moorings with a flood of fresh and ex- 
citing experiences. The student is — 
remember — only an American boy: his 
life has a thin background; he is not 
steadied by the traditions and conven- 
tions that in older societies keep things 
in place. The past does not control 
him; the future equally lacks fixity. 
Vague ambitions — his own, his fami- 
ly's, — hinder concentration on a definite 
object; well-known examples of illogi- 
cal and unearned success breed a de- 
moralizing confidence that the law of 
cause and effect will be suspended for 
his benefit, too. College life is an in- 
terlude, a respite. How can we figure 
out that in this moment of release from 
pressure, of suddenly expanded hori- 
zon, the boy may safely undertake to 
118 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

steer his bark in unknown waters by the 
shifting pole-star of his own misty 
purpose? Until the preparatory 
school develops in him intelligence 
and conscience strong enough to con- 
trol, even if not wholly to absorb him, 
an elective system whose outcome hangs 
upon the seriousness and fitness of ini- 
tial choice is bound to be largely wasted 
and frequently abused. 

The college assumes that the boy 
will profit by his mistakes, but it leaves 
him without means of correcting them. 
The teaching machine starts not tenta- 
tively but at full speed. A youth who 
after a few weeks discovers that he has 
mistaken either himself or his course, 
is powerless to set the thing right. His 
plight will be still worse if he switches 
to courses already well advanced. The 
opportunity and the disposition experi- 
119 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

mentally to "taste" before conunitting 
one's self, so wisely encouraged in the 
German universities, are here lacking. 
The usual contribution towards en- 
abling a boy to make an appropriate 
choice and to follow it out logically, 
is a class-officer or * 'adviser," — a Pro- 
fessor with lectures to give, researches 
to supervise, investigations of his own 
to carry on. He is not as a rule quali- 
fied by his primary interests and con- 
cerns to do the delicate and tedious 
work of "advising"; he has no time for 
it. In the end it means nothing to him. 
As a matter of fact, intelligent ad- 
vising would under the circumstances 
completely absorb the adviser : he would 
have to know all the facts at the start, 
and to keep them continuously in mind. 
Every term brings its fresh problems 
in selection and co-ordination; at every 
120 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

stage, a real adviser would have his 
hands full. The nominal intervention 
of this functionary cannot, therefore, 
materially affect the operation of the 
elective system. For the most part, 
advice is equivalent to perfunctory con- 
sent to propositions which the student 
himself submits under influences that 
have as a rule little to do with the 
avowed intention of the system.^ 

1 A recent graduate writes me as follows : "The 
relations between adviser and student begin when 
the latter submits his schedule of studies for the 
adviser's approval. This operation is usually per- 
fectly perfunctory, consumes anywhere from one to 
ten minutes, during which the adviser endeavors to 
acquaint himself with his new charge, offers a few 
commonplace suggestions, appends his signature and 
'The deed is done.' I venture to say that in many 
instances here, unfortunately, the relationship between 
teacher and student summarily ends, never to be re- 
vived during the whole college course. I must admit 
that the advisory system, operated as at present, car- 
ries little weight, and I think that a large percentage 
of men will bear me out in the statement that it is 
looked upon in general as little more than a joke." 

To make matters still worse, certain colleges pro- 
lyl 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

But there are still greater difficult- 
ies ahead. What warrant can be ad- 
duced from either psychology or ex- 
perience for the automatic and judici- 

vide a change of advisers from year to year. At 
Yale, for instance, the Freshman has a class-officer 
to steer him; as Sophomore, he comes mider a mem- 
ber of the Tutorial Board; as Junior and Senior, 
when his elective range is untrammeled, he is left 
entirely to his own devices. All possibility of con- 
secutive advice is thus entirely destroyed. At Cornell, 
where a reaction against the elective system ap- 
pears to be under way. President Schurman can- 
didly states: "The need of guidance has been proved 
by experience. But in practice it has been signally 
wanting. After prolonged consideration, two methods 
of guidance have been adopted, one impersonal, the 
other personal. Of his thirty hours, the Freshman 
is required to take twelve (impersonal guidance). 
At the beginning of the Junior year, the student 
chooses some one Professor or Assistant Professor 
as his adviser" (personal guidance). President's Re- 
port, 1905-06, pp. 25, 26, abridged. This plan is 
likewise open to objection as discontinuous. The im- 
personal guidance of the critical Freshman and Soph- 
omore years means no guidance at all in 3-5 of the 
work; the adviser of the Junior and Senior years, 
even if credited with time and interest, comes on 
the field too late. His advice cannot be retroactive. 
The most that he can do is to make the best of what 
he finds. 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

ous self-assertion that the elective sys- 
tem presupposes at this particular mo- 
ment? A tremendous endowment will, 
of course, make its way to the light; it 
will survive the deadly preparatory 
school drill. In other cases the boy's 
choice may or may not be significant. 
Who knows whether the impulse de- 
ciding the moment's choice is really 
more characteristic, more permanent, 
than the secondary interest which an in- 
telligent instructor might develop by 
patiently fishing with a longer line in 
the deeper waters of the boy's mind? 

I confess myself somewhat puzzled 
to make out just what it is that declares 
itself when the elective system abruptly 
gets to work, when the bars are let 
down and the field is opened to choice. 
Bent, endowment, capacity — w^e are 
told. How then is bent to be conceiv- 
ing 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ed? Is it with or without premonition 
of its ultimate goal, of the concrete 
form in which it is destined to find em- 
bodiment? Does it work as an instinct, 
or as rational, self-conscious purpose? 
If bent is an instinct, it must be cred- 
ited with a curious affinity for appro- 
priate college courses; for it must at 
once on the basis of brief verbal desig- 
nations select its proper nutriment from 
some hundred pages of catalogue. 
Nay, not only must it pitch upon the 
course best suited to its immediate 
need ; it must follow this with an equal- 
ly logical "next"; and so on from step 
to step, until the instinctive gradually 
changes into a rational process, real- 
izing in its progress what in the end 
turns out to be a coherent and purpose- 
ful scheme. This, on the supposition 
that the Freshman's bent works itself 
124 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

out after the manner of an instinct. 
The alternative view assumes that 
the boy knows from the first what he 
is driving at: it makes the elective sys- 
tem answer a rational, not an instinc- 
tive, need. The student is now con- 
ceived as intelligently minded to be a 
physician, a lawyer, or an engineer. 
He has chosen a definite end; to sim- 
plify the case favorably for the elective 
system, we shall suppose him to have 
chosen wisely. Well, thereby he is, as 
far as concerns that end, estopped from 
further choice. His freedom is prac- 
tically exhausted in that one act. To 
the extent to which he continues from 
time to time to choose freely, his origi- 
nal choice is likely to be thwarted or 
confused. For the career chosen is an 
objective thing for which a definite 
course of preparation is necessary. 
125 



THE AiAIERICAN COLLEGE 

There is absolutely no reason to credit 
a college Freshman with the serious- 
ness or the knowledge required to put 
together a course of study which will in 
these days best serve as introduction to 
his vocation. Trust the boy's bent, if 
you will, to commit him to a proper vo- 
cation: the subsequent moves are in the 
main from that instant objectively de- 
termined. They cannot be left to his 
interest or inclination to choose from 
term to term. It is no longer a ques- 
tion as to whether he likes the indispen- 
sable preliminary steps; he likes the 
end ; he must henceforth submit to what- 
ever that end demands. His efficiency 
depends now on submission, not on as- 
sertion. To build up the groundwork 
required in these days for an intelligent 
career in medicine, law, or technical sci- 
ence he may be compelled to travel far 
126 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

from his inclination; to cultivate many 
repellent fields; nothing in the elective 
system exercises such an authoritative 
control over his subsidiary choices/ 
The ultimate goal once chosen, nothing 
compels the intervening steps to lead 
reasonably to it. The elective scheme 
has no necessary, inner logic. I may, 
for example, decide that my bent is 
medicine ; and I may then prepare for a 
course in the medical school by wasting 
my time on a senseless conglomeration 
of Spanish, geology and fine arts; or 
I may utilize the same combination as a 
preliminary to law. A case has recent- 

1 1 quote from Mr. Edmund Gosse's account of his 
education a sentence that covers this point: "I got 
the habit of going on with any piece of work I had 
in hand, not flagging because the interest or pictur- 
esqueness of the theme had declined, but pushing 
forth towards a definite goal, well-foreseen and 
limited beforehand." 

Father and Son, p. 189. 

127 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ly come to my notice in which a student, 
intending from the first to enter a med- 
ical school, took for four years "all the 
chemistry he could;" but never set foot 
in a class in any branch of biology! 

Finally, it may be argued that the 
elective system need not work in either 
of the ways mentioned, that it need not 
assume either an entirely instinctive 
choice from step to step, or an entirely 
rational choice of an ultimate control- 
ling object; in that event, I maintain, 
it is absolutely bound to be discursive 
and aimless ; a thing of shreds, patches, 
impulses, without thoroughness, logic 
or coherency. All sorts of incongru- 
ous and irrelevant motives now assist in 
determining the student's choices, in 
place of the individual capacity or pur- 
pose in behalf of which the system was 
instituted; he takes one subject because 
128 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

so many others take it, another because 
of the lecturer, another because it has 
vogue as a "culture-subject," another 
because the hour is convenient, still an- 
other because it is a "snap": he must in 
the supposed case choose in this capri- 
cious fashion. Exclude as non-exis- 
tent a sure-footed instinct, and as rare, 
a clear-headed purpose, and the door 
is inevitably opened to this conglomera- 
tion of impulse and influence. And 
this is just what actually happens. 
The most that is now claimed for the 
system by its defenders is that there is 
under it a "fair amount of judicious 
choice of correlated subjects;" and this 
they are exceedingly solicitous to dem- 
onstrate. Their position is thus a curi- 
ous one: there is such a thing as judi- 
cious correlation measured, of course, 
by objective standards; they rejoice 
9 129 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

when it is attained, — it proves that the 
system works and how. Yet the col- 
lege has no duty towards those — the 
majority — ^whose ignorance of them- 
selves or of the actual requirements of 
their probable careers, abandons them 
to an uncorrected admixture of studies ! 
Our case is yet clearer when we pass 
from the immediate vocational to other 
aspects of individual activity. An 
elective system that gives effect only to 
dominant personal choice loses sight of 
other not less essential activities. Such 
activities are indispensably important to 
fulness and wholesomeness of life ; they 
protect us against such total immersion 
in special occupations as would threaten 
to destroy the very basis of interaction 
among men. Now, then, neither within 
the college itself nor in the mandate is- 
sued to the secondary school does the 
130 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

college recognize the pedagogical bear- 
ing of the general conditions accom- 
panying all forms of individual effort. 
It is no foregone conclusion that mere 
existence within a community will ef- 
fectually prepare a man for his proper 
part in its intellectual interests and so- 
cial struggles. I hold that if a liberal 
education is anything more than a per- 
sonal indulgence or a personal oppor- 
tunity, the college has a very distinct 
task in reference to the impersonal as- 
pects of social and civic life. 

Let me make this point clear by re- 
course to a concrete illustration: We 
will suppose a Freshman class composed 
of several hundred clear-headed articu- 
late-speaking youths, each one keen, 
capable, knowing what he wants, reso- 
lute to do it. This is the elective sys- 
tem at its rarest and best: is it enough? 
131 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Not in my judgment: it amounts to 
sheer educational atomism; a-social, if 
not actually anti-social. The educated 
man so viewed is only an exceptionally 
vigorous and knowing parasite ; into his 
hands the social and economic situation 
plays. It is more or less an accident, if 
his activity incidentally carries benefi- 
cent consequences. As far as his pur- 
pose is concerned, society is his field, his 
opportunity ; to the extent that he is en- 
grossed with himself, a distinct antag- 
onism results. 

It is, in a word, impossible to con- 
ceive the educational orientation of the 
boy as merely a matter of comfortable 
or advantageous professional or voca- 
tional setting. Of course, efficiency is 
in any case admirable; and the social 
value of a service is not wholly a ques- 
tion of its conscious intent. But it is 
132 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

none the less impossible to believe that 
modern intellectual life is to develop in 
water-tight compartments ; that the col- 
lege does its full duty when it produces 
separately preliminary lawyers, doc- 
tors, chemists, artists, without common 
ground. In other words a man is not 
exhausted, when he is trained to be en- 
gineer, doctor or mason. Such a class- 
ification may be economically, it is not 
socially or personally, the end of him. 
It cannpt, therefore, be the end of him 
educationally. Society is not a mere 
mosaic of sharply accentuated econom- 
ic units. In the first place, relations 
of immense educational importance 
converge upon the individual from the 
surrounding social mass. He is born 
into an organized and artificial order. 
His obligations are as binding as his 
privileges are precious. And neither 
133 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

set is obvious. Of course he adjusts 
himself to this social environment in 
a blind way as he grows up. He 
learns that he can vote at twenty- 
one; that all men are equal before the 
law. He absorbs the current ethical 
and political standards. But has 
higher education no positive duty here? 
Can it totally neglect this aspect of the 
boy's orientation? Under the elective 
system the college does neglect it; it 
does not require the boy necessarily to 
take thought of the social and civic re- 
lations here in question during a single 
moment of the eight years needed to 
get a liberal education and to lay the 
foundation for it. In all that immedi- 
ately pertains to his calling, the college 
proposes to equip him at a high level, 
but in respect to his civic and human 
134 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

relations, it leaves him on the plane of 
accident, habit and prejudice. 

In yet another respect a man's vo- 
cation does not contain him; he runs 
over. What we loosely call his 
"tastes," whether connected with what 
we call his business or independent of 
it, are equally important to the com- 
pleteness of his self-expression, to his 
sanity and sweetness of mind. His 
range of appreciation must be wider 
than that of his express vocational ac- 
tivity; a supple mind is at least as 
important as a supple body. These 
facts are assuredly not without bearing 
on the details of an education designed 
thoroughly to exploit the individual. 
They take account, indeed, of interests 
that form in considerable measure the 
basis of large and disinterested intel- 
135 - 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

lectual intercourse with one's fellows; 
they make the broad and open highway 
upon which our separate and private 
estates open. The college attitude in 
reference to them is merely permissive. 
Opportunities are offered which would 
enable a student to supplement or 
broadly to buttress his special training. 
It is left altogether to chance whether 
he takes advantage of them. The pres- 
sure of a competition, the issue of which 
is decided on the narrowest lines, tends 
to ehminate all factors that do not count 
in the race. The college does nothing 
to resist this tendency, except through 
the passive offer of opportunity. Ac- 
tively it even assists the tendency, by 
deciding fitness for its own purposes on 
the same narrow basis. 

I submit that an education which 
136 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

seeks to find for every individual his 
appropriate place cannot construe its 
undertaking narrowly without disinte- 
grating the society it sets out to serve. 
It cannot survey its pedagogical prob- 
lem and conceive its pedagogical pro- 
cedure simply from the standpoint of 
the individual student, — and from a 
single aspect of his real concern at that. 
Undoubtedly its central aim is, under 
existing conditions to lay the philo- 
sophic and scientific foundations of 
typical intellectual activities. But ex- 
clusive pre-occupation with this side 
threatens to break up the college into 
several parallel, but quite separate dis- 
ciplines, each engrossed in its own 
object. The college is, therefore, not to 
be regarded as a training school in the 
interest of bare professional com- 
167 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

petency. It has definite functions 
that go beyond the vocational destiny 
of the boy. 

By what token does an education 
such as we have now discussed continue 
to call itself "liberal"? "Liberal," if it 
means anything at all, must refer to the 
very elements which in the supposed 
case the elective system tends strongly 
to leave out of account. This is begin- 
ning to be vaguely perceived; hence an 
increasingly frequent reference to "cul- 
ture-courses" ; a growing disposition to 
explain away the aimless meanderings 
of the lost elector by setting down to 
"culture" what obviously cannot be 
justified by intelligible purpose. Not 
infrequently, I suspect, the culture mo- 
tive is alleged as an apology for scholar- 
ship not high enough to support a more 
serious interpretation! If, according- 
13S 



/ 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

ly, a student, intending to become phy- 
sician, elects biology the elective sys- 
tem is credited with a triumph ; but if a 
student, intending to be a banker, takes 
the same course, lo! there you have 
broad and liberal culture! 

Meantime, the course in question is 
conducted, as we shall see in the next 
chapter, in explicit reference to neither : 
it is conducted by and for biologists! 
The same holds of other departments: 
"the teaching of mathematics under an 
elective system cannot comfortably take 
account of the non-mathematical mind," 
frankly admits Dean Briggs.^ No 
more can — or does — the teaching of 
English, history, physics, or what not. 
An elective system in which the instruc- 
tors are specialists exists for special- 
ists. The presumption is that courses 

1 Harvard Annual Reports, 1899-1900, p. 118. 
139 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

are chosen by those specially, not gen- 
erally, interested in them. Of the 
broad fundamental concern conveyed 
by the term "culture," no considerable 
account is taken. 

An effort has been made to meet this 
difficulty by means of a required Fresh- 
man course, which practically continues 
the required portion of the prepara- 
tory school routine. This procedure 
is supposed to contribute once and for 
all "breadth of culture" to the college 
course; and it is held to be additionally 
recommended by the fact that a "broad 
basis" is calculated to ensure the suc- 
cess of whatever personal superstruc- 
ture is erected upon it, in the course of 
the three years following. Two objec- 
tions may be confidently brought 
against this somewhat confused scheme : 
in the first place, "culture" thus hud- 
140 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

died into a preliminary year takes ho 
root, — a fact made abundantly plain by 
our college product; in the second, the 
validity of the interests here in question 
does not in any degree depend on their 
serviceableness as a basis for an educa- 
tion in which they are subsequently 
ignored. They are valid, if at all, as 
continuous and accompanying consid- 
erations from the very first to the very 
end; and not because they make a solid 
basis anterior to the really serious busi- 
ness of college education. "Culture" 
and "vocation" are not to be conceived 
as consecutive. They go along to- 
gether, overlapping, playing upon each 
other, enriching and diversifying life 
as a whole, increasing its range and vol- 
ume.^ 

1 A word should perhaps be said about still another 
variation of the elective system. Some colleges 
through a guarded system of p re-requisites, others 

141 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

So far I have criticized the elective 
system from the stand-point of prin- 
ciple; let us glance for a moment at its 
practical operation from the point of 
view of the students. What does it do 
for the seriously minded youth ? What 
for his brother, of opposite inclination? 

Of the latter we may make short 
work: the elective system does not ex- 
ploit his capacity. It does not require 
him to probe himself. It simply fur- 
nishes him an abundant opportunity to 

through fixed combinations or groups aim to control 
choice on departmental lines. These devices do not 
go to the root of the trouble, since they remedy none 
of the defects in the previous procedure. Unques- 
tionably, however, they not only compel a certain 
amount of forethought, but also cut off dispersion 
during the years in which they operate. In general 
it may be urged that while they promote depart- 
mental concentration, they fall short of both liberal 
and vocational organization. For this reason the 
modifications in question have had no great influence 
on the type of instruction offered, as will be shown 
in the next chapter 

142 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

exercise a low ingenuity in picking his 
way to a degree with the least exertion, 
the least inconvenience in the way of 
hours/ the least shock to the prejudices 
which function for him in place of 
ideas, tastes and convictions. He 
comes out at the spout as he went in at 
the hopper, — except for the additional 
moral havoc wrought by four years of 
"beating the game." 

Capable students with well-defined 
aptitudes tend under the elective sys- 
tem to premature narrowness. They 
know their line; they come to college 
eager, capable, self-confident. Their 

1 "Young undergraduate Yale under the elective 
system does its best to secure courses which let it 
off from recitations Saturday and Monday mornings; 
and as absence from the single Sunday service ap- 
pears to be pretty readily obtained, there is an easy 
possibility of two and a half days in the week of 
'elective' freedom from work." Editorial, Yale 
Alumni Weekly, April 5, 1905. 

143 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

elections hew close to their bent. There 
is nothing to ensure a broad basis, a 
large and luminous development wheth- , 
er from the social or vocational point of 
view. I have already shown how the 
elective system ignores the educational 
aspects of the inclusive social and hu- 
man relationships. Further, it leaves 
the student entirely free to follow his 
special interest narrowly. Now, this 
amounts to anticipating in the relative- 
ly elementary stages of a pursuit, the 
exclusiveness that is a regrettable ne- 
cessity in the very highest. It is bound 
to tell heavily against the solidity of 
subsequent scholarship. The sharp 
separateness of the various departments 
of science, for instance, is at bottom 
mythical. It does not exist. It is 
simply assumed at high levels as a mat- 
ter of convenience. Of fundamen- 
144i 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

tal inter-relations, the elective system 
takes no necessary cognizance. The 
beginner is frequently free to take most 
of his courses in one department and 
just enough others at random to fill out 
his required number; and the others do 
not have to be cognate to any rational 
purpose. The prospective psychologist 
may thus neglect to lay in the indis- 
pensable store of physiology; the in- 
tending economist may ignore ethics 
and history; the historian escape ade- 
quate contact with literature or philoso- 
phy; the biologist may omit chemistry; 
the chemist may omit physics. The 
elective system impoverishes and iso- 
lates by excessive and premature 
specialism where it does not waste by 
aimless dispersion.^ 

1 In some colleges the student is required to scat- 
ter his choices among various departments; but he 

10 145 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Between the two classes briefly no- 
ticed, comes the majority: the average 
boy, so called, — decidedly the predom- 
inant type in point of frequency. He 
is still to be made. Can it be seriously 
maintained that he clears up under the 
operation of the elective system, real- 
izes what he is good for, what he is 
meant for? He came to college with- 
out manifest aptitude; the secondary 
education, which might have been a 
cautious effort to dissect it out or 
create a substitute buried it deeply 
under a mass of rubbish. For him, 
freedom means diffusion, superficiality. 
The elective system tempts him in a 
dozen different directions; arouses a 
dozen different interests that collapse 
at the moment when effort or persis- 

is neither compelled nor effectively assisted to cor- 
relate these choices with each other or in reference 
to a definite ultimate end. 

146 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

tence is demanded. This is the mean- 
ing of many isolated single courses, 
pursued in different departments. 
The elective system deteriorates into 
tickling of the palate. Eventually the 
boy's real salvation comes, if at all, 
when, in competition vi^ith the unedu- 
cated barbarians of the outer world, he 
faces the alternative of efficiency or 
starvation. But this is exactly what on 
higher ground the elective system ought 
to have accomplished for him. If it 
does not find the boy endowed with pur- 
pose, it must develop purpose within 
him. I do not see how the college can 
escape this obligation; in the end, the 
modern educational theory of deter- 
mining the individual's destiny signifi- 
cantly rather than arbitrarily must be 
judged by the success with which we 
can in the interests of economy, eff ec- 
147 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

tiveness, variety, rely on the develop- 
ment in each student of high and con- 
tinuous endeavor. The moment we 
cease to decide a boy's occupation by in- 
heritance, convention, early and arbi- 
trary apprenticeship, and propose, in- 
stead, to decide it by his highest capac- 
ity, that moment we are pledged to pro- 
vide an intelligent and effective ma- 
chinery to accomplish this object. The 
elective system means to be such an in- 
strument, but it fails. 

Thus far I have spoken of the elec- 
tive system in its most unqualified 
form. The case is not essentially dif- 
ferent in institutions that defer election 
until the Sophomore year and even 
there impose a few restrictions. Delay 
does not itself meet the fundamental 
objections to unorganized choice, super- 
148. 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

posed on a preparation that has done 
little or nothing to equip the boy to use 
such discretion. The practical effect of 
the postponement is merely to lengthen 
by a year the unintelligent preparatory 
school routine. At the close of the pre- 
scribed Freshman year, the boy is still 
in darkness as to the very points on 
which he needs enlightenment,— namely, 
his capacity and the special pursuits 
adapted to it. It is true that he has had 
a year in which to learn the ropes, to get 
acquainted through upper classmen 
with the character of teachers and 
courses; in consequence of which, how- 
ever, his choice is less likely to be guid- 
ed by his own actual needs than by col- 
lege gossip. In a word, when, in the 
Sophomore year, election begins, there 
is nothing to ensure even then a ration- 
149 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

al choice of studies or the intelUgent 
correlation of studies in inter-depend- 
ent realms. 

It is clear that Mr. Adams is entire- 
ly justified in objecting to the elective 
system as "crude, ill-considered, thor- 
oughly unscientific and extremely mis- 
chievous." ^ Its very apologists damn 
it with faint praise. Harvard rests up- 
on the modest claim that as a body 
the students use it with "some sense of 
responsibility and reasonable intelli- 
gence." ^ More recently, in replying 
to Mr. Adams, Prof. Hart has defend- 
ed the system on the remarkable ground 
that it defeats itself. The objection 
having been urged that the student is 
not competent to choose from the rich 
banquet spread before him. Prof. Hart 

1 Phi Beta Kappa address, already quoted. 

2 Annual Reports, 1899-1900. 

150 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

replies: "In practice a large number of 
students make most of their choices out 
of a comparatively small part of the of- 
ferings." ^ But does not the elective 
system thus desert its flag? Criticized 
on the ground of the student's unfit- 
ness for self -direction, it answers that 
as a matter of fact the student does not 
attempt to direct himself: he follows 
the pack. Prof. Hart continues: "By 
this process most of the good features 
of a fixed curriculum are actually at- 
tained, for nearly all the students choose 
some history, some economics, some 
philosophy, some science and several 
languages." This is a queer defence. 
In the beginning the fixed curriculum 
was set aside in favor of the elective 
system because it was not specifically 
adapted to the individual; because it 

1 Boston Transcript, June 14, 1906. 
151 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

possessed no inner or organic unity. 
Now Prof. Hart defends the elective 
system by the plea that the curriculum 
organized by the student is just such a 
hodge-podge; urging that, if hetero- 
geneity is regarded as a virtue of the 
old non-adjustable curriculum, the elec- 
tive system is equally effective in pro- 
viding a curriculum of arbitrary shreds 
and patches for each individual! Fi- 
nally, by way of totally abandoning 
all pretence of actually developing the 
boy along vital and appropriate lines: 
"The usual and perhaps the best adviser 
of the student is the friend who recom- 
mends or warns against the courses that 
he has himself taken." In other words, 
not my own actual or probable bent or 
purpose, but my chum's likes or dislikes 
must steer me through an education 
established for the purposeful exploita- 
152 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

tion of my endowment! Is not this, I 
ask, throughout a defence of the elec- 
tive system on the ground that it is not 
an elective system after all? 

Better words than these can be 
spoken for elasticity. The elective ^ 
system has in its present shape a nega- 
tive significance only. It was a de- 
structive attack upon an outgrown and 
arbitrary educational order. It per- 
formed in education the sort of service 
that laissez-faire performed in econom- 
ics and politics: it battered down artifi- 
cial and harmful restrictions. The 
educational field is now free for con- 
structive effort: for a positive, not a 
negative, doctrine. It is not enough to 
say that the individual's maximum 
value depends on his finding purpose- 
ful activities and therein to assume that 
the necessary leading will at nineteen 
153 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

spontaneously unroll and fulfil itself. 
It does no such thing; it has got to be 
extricated, perhaps even created, and 
at all events skilfully developed in all 
its essential external and internal bear- 
ings. This then is the sound kernel in 
election: the individual's bent must be 
heeded, if he has one ; in its absence, he 
must be endowed with a concrete and 
definite object. In either case the 
studies employed must be combined and 
pursued so as to satisfy standards and 
requirements that exist altogether in- 
dependently of the average boy's ca- 
price. But having proposed to itself 
so much, the college has just begun. 
It cannot act as if the individual were, 
for educational purposes, practically 
exhausted by his main concern, when 
once this has been made out. He needs 
to be opened up more variously ; to come 
154 



THE ELECTIVE SYSTEM 

in contact with his fellows at other 
points. He needs above all a broad 
and intelligent orientation in the social 
and intellectual as in the physical world. 
At various points then his interests or 
impulses must be extended and may be 
overruled. To start with, the general 
pre-suppositions of social and political 
life put a certain original compulsion 
upon him; later, when he has freely 
chosen his career, compulsion again 
takes place: objective standards pre- 
scribe what he is to master. The actual 
educational process thus always medi- 
ates between an individual of a certain 
significant constitution and the concrete 
social and physical world. The old 
education saw only the relative fixity 
of the latter; hence its dogmatic ex- 
ternal attitude. Too often the so- 
called new education tries to see every- 
155 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

thing from the standpoint of individual 
impulse: hence its instability, its ca- 
priciousness. An organic education 
seeking to realize the maximum value 
of the individual in a given social en- 
vironment will bring these two partial 
views together. 



156 



CHAPTER V 

GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

SO far I have accounted for the in- 
efficiency of the college by point- 
ing out that its treatment of secondary 
education fails to play into the hands 
of the elective system, to which it leads 
up. I have further urged that the 
elective system itself at once miscon- 
ceives the student and ignores the com- 
pulsory character of the correlations 
through which allied subjects buttress 
each other. Now, in the present chap- 
ter, I shall more specifically examine 
the teaching itself. Should still fur- 
ther explanation of the failure of the 
college vigorously to engage youth be 
157 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

required, we shall discover it in the en- 
croachment of graduate school methods 
and interests on the college depart- 
ment. 

Historically, as I have pointed out, 
the expansion of the college was the 
acknowledgment of the equal impor- 
tance of all practical activities reposing 
on a learned or scientific foundation, 
the effort to provide for each its under- 
lying discipline. Simultaneously it be- 
came clear that these fundamental bases 
were not themselves fixed and finished 
once for all. Each of them is in the 
making. The chemistry that the fu- 
ture student of medicine requires is 
undergoing a continuous revision; so 
the physics of the engineer, the math- 
ematics of the astronomer or logician. 
The moment that these studies congeal 
they lose part at least of their vitaliz- 
158 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

ing suggestive efficacy. The stream of 
knowledge must keep flowing. The 
waters soon grow brackish, unless fed 
from pure, remote mountain springs. 
Moreover, there is no telHng from what 
unlikely recess or dark cavern a full 
fresh current may be released. These 
considerations account for the rise of 
the graduate school. 

The two departments are closely re- 
lated; but they are not identical, nor 
are their needs the same. It is impor- 
tant for the college to keep in touch 
with the renovating movement just de- 
scribed; to welcome, test, give efl*ect to 
suggestions proceeding therefrom. 
But its own imm,ediate business, viewed 
from the standpoint of knowledge and 
training, is to enable the student to 
master the solid acquisitions that con- 
stitute at the moment the status quo; 
159 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

to comprehend alike pre-suppositions 
and problems. On the resolution of 
these problems the graduate school later 
brings to bear all the formidable artil- 
lery of modern research. 

Here, then, is indicated a sufficiently 
sharp distinction in the matter of equip- 
ment and opportunities. There is ap- 
parently no limit to the resources that 
advanced research may profitably em- 
ploy; but the college not only does not 
require an equally extensive outfit, — it 
is bound to be injured thereby. For 
the necessary pre-condition to highly 
specialized research later is thorough 
preliminary training in past achieve- 
ment and a more than superficial knowl- 
edge of correlated branches. It can 
be best obtained by means of a compact 
and skilfully organized curriculum, 
adequately taught amid conditions in 
160 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

which the teacher and his pupil are in 
close and constant intercourse. Such 
training is an abundant occupation for 
an ordinary college course; and it is 
likely to be seriously interfered with by 
the tempting proffer of opportunities 
that really belong to the graduate 
school. 

The proper work of the graduate 
school then rests upon a definite col- 
lege foundation, just exactly as, each in 
its peculiar way, the study of law or 
medicine rests upon it. With a view 
to every one of them, the college is to 
develop the boy's power, harden his 
fibre, put an edge on his purpose, and 
inculcate a usable basis of fundamen- 
tal knowledge. With amazing blind- 
ness to the necessary chronological re- 
lationship according to which one of 
these functions must precede the other, 
11 161 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the American college practically amal- 
gamates the undergraduate and gradu- 
ate departments ! The college becomes 
thus practically coextensive with the 
graduate school. It covers an equally 
wide territory and in just as great de- 
tail; necessarily to the prejudice of its 
own essential function. 

The amalgamation is of course not 
avowed. Ostensibly the two depart- 
ments are distinct. They profess quite 
different objects; they confer differ- 
ent degrees ; they are controlled by sep- 
arately organized boards ; they are even 
described in different pamphlets. But, 
astonishing to relate, in all that actual- 
ly constitutes a school, namely, in the in- 
struction offered, the college and the 
graduate department are practically 
identical ! 

This then is the situation : the Ameri- 
162 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

can university offers certain lecture and 
laboratory courses and exercises; first, 
it labels them the college and opens 
them to boys fresh from the second- 
ary school in quest of the Bachel- 
or's degree; next, it labels them gradu- 
ate school, and opens them at the same 
time to mature men, engaged in win- 
ning the Doctorate! In a vast major- 
ity of university exercises, graduates 
and undergraduates mingle; despite 
different antecedents and different 
aims, at the close of each course, every 
student is supposed to have got what is 
appropriate to his wants and needs. 
Two or three targets stand side by side ; 
with one bullet the instructor under- 
takes to hit the bull's eye in each. 

The courses in question usually fall 
into three classes, according to the needs 
of the students to whom they are sup- 
163 



THE AIMERICAN COLLEGE 

posedly best adapted: those primarily 
intended for undergraduates, those 
primarily intended for graduates, and 
those intended in equal measure for 
both. Practically nowhere does the 
word "exclusively" appear/ The old 
class distinctions have also almost en- 
tirely vanished. Even where they are 
retained, a course is often announced as 
equally suitable to "sophomores, juniors 
and seniors," and graduates are not ex- 
cluded. It is thus designed to gather in 
the same classes undergraduates at al- 
most every stage of advancement, and 
no precaution is taken against still fur- 
ther complicating the situation for the 
instructor by allowing graduates also 

1 Princeton, just fairly started in developing a 
graduate department, announces that its graduate 
courses " are open to graduate students only." It 
does not close undergraduate courses to graduate stu- 
dents. 

164 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

freely to filter in. Nothing can be call- 
ed strictly graduate or strictly under- 
graduate. In the most advanced 
courses, there is no assured privacy for 
maturity or competency. In one in- 
stitution the consent of the instructor 
opens certain specifically graduate 
courses to undergraduate students; in 
another, it is "the object of the new ar- 
rangement to lead the undergraduate 
to feel tHat under the elective system, he 
has the great opportunity of doing in 
college, at least some one piece of ad- 
vanced work." So the "unripe" un- 
dergraduate invades the seminaries and 
research laboratories, just as the ripe or 
over-ripe graduate straggles into the 
introductory courses. Under such con- 
ditions, no really scholarly tests regu- 
late admission to advanced opportuni- 
ties. Wherever the undergraduate's 
165 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

entrance to courses, primarily intended 
for graduates, depends merely upon 
the informal consent of the instructor, 
the temperament of the instructor, 
rather than the scholarship of the stu- 
dent, is put on trial. It is impossible 
to regard this formality as constitut- 
ing an effective bar to incompetency 
and immaturity. 

As against this tendency to com- 
pound an emulsion of graduate and 
undergraduate students of all stages, 
I maintain that radical differences in 
age, attitude and aim cannot be ig- 
nored. The graduate student is phys- 
ically and mentally grown; the under- 
graduate is physically and mentally 
growing. The former has the serious- 
ness of maturity; the latter, the flighti- 
ness of youth. The graduate has his 
166 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

eye on a career; the undergraduate is 
still beating about in search — or avoid- 
ance — of one. The graduate has 
wants; the undergraduate has chiefly 
needs. The college is trying to make 
something of the boy — a scientist, for 
instance; the graduate school is trying 
to make science. How can a single 
class exercise at one and the same time 
serve ends so disparate? Of course, 
the graduate school does not merely 
investigate: the critical study of 
achieved results is prominent. Like- 
wise the college gets far beyond the 
shallow water in which it pushes off. 
But the two do not therefore meet. If 
the B. A. degree signifies anything, the 
graduate student, who is going ahead 
on his elective line, must have already 
traversed, wholly or largely, even the 
167 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

deepest water which the undergradu- 
ate attempts ; at the very least, the pace 
of the elder should be swifter. 

Further, the two departments and 
hence the instructors in every class- 
room are subject to diverse kinds of 
responsibility; they regard their stu- 
dents from sharply contrasted points of 
view. Practically the dividing line 
must perhaps be somewhat arbitrarily 
drawn, for the boy merges impercept- 
ibly into the man. But the distinction 
is none the less real and important; the 
hazy border between two patches of 
color does not make the patches them- 
selves hazy. The college never loses 
sight of the boy as boy; he is to be 
initiated into studies that must be em- 
ployed to reach and to stimulate his 
intelligence. Now, as opposed to this 
personal concern, the graduate school 
168 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

is uncompromisingly objective. It is 
indifferent to individuals. Its heart is 
set on the outer fact. And for the 
outer fact no price is too great to pay. 
An exacting technique, pitiless and dis- 
interested, eliminates personal consider- 
ations ; the severity of science and schol- 
arship knows no mitigation: their 
standards are brutally careless of the 
worker. How different the college at- 
mosphere, where the strictest standard 
is satisfied to accomplish with the 
student the best it can, — his inheritance, 
endowment, environment considered! 

The experience of the Harvard Law 
School illustrates the point I am mak- 
ing. Formerly college undergraduates 
were permitted to take work in the law 
school, and men registered in the law 
school were permitted to complete un- 
finished college vrork. The practice 
169 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

has been discontinued, because care- 
fully pre]3ared statistics show that such 
students fall far below the men whose 
work is solely in the law school and 
whose interests are solely in graduate 
work. Do the highly specialized pur- 
suits of the Graduate School of Arts 
and Sciences require less maturity than 
the study of law? 

It is true that the instructor is vested 
with power to exclude the unfit. The 
authority is bound to be amiably exer- 
cised ; for vigorous action would at once 
effect the separation which the present 
system is designed to avoid. In con- 
sequence instruction does not sharply 
define itself. It is, within a single 
course, elementary and advanced by 
turns; oscillating, according as the 
instructor is at the moment the more 
keenly conscious of one or the other 
170 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

component of his double audience. 
Effective instruction, however, pre- 
supposes a homogeneous assembly. 
The good teacher cannot deliver him- 
self into the air; his utterance takes 
form in direct reference to his hearers. 
A Berlin professor, discussing univer- 
sity co-education on the Continent, ob- 
jected that the frequent admission of 
women whose preliminary training had 
rarely been sufficiently thorough, nec- 
essarily impaired the homogeneity of 
the student body, without which no 
lecturer can keep to a uniform level. 
I recall a very clear illustration to the 
same effect in a college exercise in 
economics that I once witnessed. The 
course belonged to the second division; 
it was thus stamped as equally suita- 
ble to both graduates and undergrad- 
uates. The instructor was thoroughly 
171 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

admirable, — keen, vigorous, scholarly. 
He questioned closely, alertly, but al- 
ways fairly, with the obvious pur- 
pose of compelling the student to see 
the point at issue in the light of 
fundamental principle. But every ef- 
fort to go ahead with the maturer 
minds was frustrated by the recurring 
necessity of stating and expounding 
the elementary principles from which 
the discussion ought to have promptly 
pulled away. The exercise was thus 
confused and futile, despite the bril- 
liancy and energy of the instructor, 
who, at its close, himself made to me 
two significant comments : that some of 
the best men in the class were absent, — 
conclusive evidence that the instruct- 
or's right to exclude the incompetent 
does not secure a homogeneous class; 
and that the course ought to be made 

in 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

more difficult of access by being placed 
in the third division — an admission of 
the impossibility of addressing gradu- 
ates and undergraduates on even 
terms. 

In the chaos which I have described 
all interests suffer; but on the whole, 
the graduate school gets the better of 
the college. It is inevitable that the 
more recent, vigorous, and clear-sight- 
ed department should encroach. The 
college is not sure of itself; the gradu- 
ate department knows just what it 
wants. Hence graduate interests, 
ideals, methods have tended to prevail; 
and resources accumulated in the 
first place for the prosaic purpose of 
training boys have been diverted 
through uncongenial methods to alien 
ends. 

For the graduate schools have as a 
lis 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

rule no separate funds or endowments.^ 
They are supported out of the general 
or college income. Now the extent to 
which the college income has been thus 
withdrawn from its historic object no 
one knows, not even the institutions 
themselves.^ Graduate instruction is 
obviously expensive. Man for man it 
costs far more to train a research 
worker than an undergraduate.^ The 
college resources are not adequate to 

1 The recently established Harvard Graduate School 
of Business is an exception; but in general the state- 
ment in the text holds. 

2 The annual Reports of the Treasurers make no 
attempt to apportion expenditure as between under- 
graduate and graduate departments. Appealing to 
the Treasurers or Presidents themselves for more 
definite information, I have been told that the ac- 
counts cannot be separated. 

3 The Report of the Treasurer of Yale University 
(1906-07) gives (p. 11) the average cost per student 
in the graduate department as $79.34, in the un- 
dergraduate as $326.10. This appears to contradict 
my statement. But the detailed statement (p. 65) 
shows that in the estimate of the cost of graduate 

174 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

both demands; it is liighly question- 
able whether they actually suffice for 
either. A conflict of interests thus in- 
evitably arose. It was in this situation 
important to proceed cautiously and 
with open eyes: to decide on educa- 
tional grounds the order in which com- 
peting claims should be met. It was, 
in a word, necessary to count the cost. 
But the cost could hardly be counted in 
advance and has not been counted yet. 
Incredible as it may seem, such is at 
this moment the case. No American 
university knows to-day, even approxi- 
mately, what it expends in salaries, la- 
boratory expenses, materials, appa- 

instruction, the items admitted are only "adminis- 
tration, clerical work, printing, postage, remission of 
tuition" etc. The entire expenditure for salaries, 
laboratories, etc., for both graduate and academic 
(undergraduate) departments is charged to the lat- 
ter. These figures therefore throw no light on the 
topic under discussion. 

175 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ratus, books for its graduate instruc- 
tion, despite the fact that the interest of 
the graduate school is at many, perhaps 
most, points, distinct from that of the 
college. The whole subject, inevitably 
involving the efficiency of college train- 
ing, is involved in darkness and con- 
fusion. The American university is 
in the plight of a general who 
has divided his forces without knowing 
exactly how. The one thing that may 
be confidently asserted is this: that 
through the expansion of graduate in- 
struction, the college has drifted into 
a policy which with existing resources 
necessarily carries with it the ineffi- 
ciency of much undergraduate instruc- 
tion.^ We shall see in a moment the 

1 In the Report previously referred to, President 
Jordan says: "Thus far in America, the one has 
antagonized the other. There has been a tendency 

176 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

make-shifts and stop-gaps with which 
the undergraduate is at the critical 
point of his training required to put 
up; the severe, international tests to 
which research is fortunately exposed 
forbid trifling in that region. For 
that the most competent teachers must 
be secured, the most delicate and recent 
apparatus, the best material, the latest 
literature; the institution that once em- 
barks on research is committed to a rela- 
tively high and increasing scale of ex- 
penditure. If a single tiller is open to 
both parties in interest, there is no ques- 
tion as to which will dip more deeply 
into it. 

I am not unmindful of the fact that 
to some extent college and graduate 
school stand on the same footing.^ 

to build up the university work by neglect of the 
collegiate work." p. 19. 
1 1 have already (p. 48, note) conceded that in 
12 177 



THE AINIERICAN COLLEGE 

This is true of all endowments given 
for general purposes since the estab- 
lishment of graduate departments. 
But an equitable portion of the income 
from these sources, supplemented by 
gifts expressly made for advanced 
work is still far from covering the cur- 
certain institutions (Johns Hopkins, etc.) the grad- 
uate and undergraduate departments are his- 
torically in this position. But it is still possi- 
ble to question the wisdom of dividing their re- 
sources. On this point, President Pritchett, of the 
Carnegie Foundation for The Advancement of Teach- 
ing says with great force in the Report from which 
I have already quoted: "Whatever may be the ad- 
vantages of the combination of the college and the 
university into one organization, I am convinced that 
it would be of immense value to the educational 
system of the country if a few strong universities 
could be established, with generous facilities for 
social intercourse, but without undergraduate col- 
leges. Such institutions would, if properly endowed 
and supported, constitute an independent influence 
in the formation of university standards which could 
not fail to benefit all universities alike. It is to' be 
regretted that some of the newly founded institutions 
did not forego the prestige of an undergraduate col- 
lege for the sake of this leadership." p. 95. 

178 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

rent expenditure for graduate inter- 
ests. As for the rest, the poHcy of the 
university can be vindicated only if 
the proximity of a graduate depart- 
ment is absolutely essential to the vigor 
of the college. The independent im- 
portance of research constitutes of 
itself no valid excuse for a partial 
abandonment by the college of its his- 
toric and still necessary function. Our 
universities have in general assumed 
that whatever promoted the interest of 
the graduate school promoted in equal 
measure the interest of the college. 
This was a dangerous assumption. It 
is still unproved.^ I shall endeavor to 

1 1 may again quote from President Pritchett's 
Report: "Whether the amalgamation of the college 
and the university into a single organization bear- 
ing the name of university is the wisest solution of 
the type of American institution of higher learning 
or not, it will be admitted that this action has tended 
to still further confuse in the minds of the public 

179 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

show in some detail how disastrous have 
been its consequences to the college 
proper. 

I have said that graduate ideals and 
interests have tended to prevail in part- 
nership affairs. This deference to the 
graduate interest begins with the or- 
ganization of the faculty. The two 
departments — graduate and under- 
graduate — possess a single faculty. 
Original appointments are usually 
made to subordinate positions; promo- 
tion is by merit. Whether this plan 
will inure to the benefit of the college 
side or that of the graduate sid^ — 
it cannot inure to their benefit equally, 
— depends wholly on the meaning of 
merit. As a matter of fact heavy odds 

the distinction between the college and the university, 
or at least to obscure the fact that the university, 
as at present organized, has two entirely dif event 
functions" p. 95. (Italics mine.) 

180 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

favor the graduate interest. The 
thing works out thus: A large num- 
ber of instructors must be appointed 
in the first place for undergraduate 
service. This body is the nursery out 
of which through successive stages pro- 
fessorial material is selected. Clearly 
the prospect of a man's developing to 
professorial proportions will figure 
largely in determining his appointment 
to an instructorship ; likewise within 
the body of instructors, promotion will 
fall to those who give quickest and 
clearest evidence of such development. 
The plan is a good one, only if the 
requirements of a college instructor- 
ship coincide with the incipient symp- 
toms of professorial competency. If 
the two make different demands, then 
the immediate needs of the one cannot 
be best satisfied by selections that look 
181 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

chiefly to the ultimate requirements of 
the other. 

Now, according to prevailing ideals, 
the supreme desideratum in a graduate 
school professor is capacity to carry 
on and inspire research. Mere teach- 
ing ability is not of course despised; 
but it is not enough, it is not even in- 
dispensable. On the merit plan, there- 
fore, subordinate positions afford the 
means of assembling and trying out 
research talent. A mere teacher may 
indeed become an instructor; he will 
also remain one. Promotions every 
where go to promising specialists and 
investigators.^ 

1 President Hadley (Report 1906) explains Yale's 
policy in reference to the Junior instructor as fol- 
lows: "If we keep places free at the top, we in- 
crease his opportunity for promotion, if his discov- 
eries turn out as he expects." No mention is made 
of the possibility of promotion on any other basis 
than that of discovery. The effect of this on the 

182 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

I confess that I see no way to avoid 
this poHcy, if a single faculty is at one 
and the same time to serve the two de- 
partments; my point is that it insid- 
iously sacrifices the college. Absorp- 
tion in laborious investigation, on which 
the future of the instructor depends, is 
calculated to abate the appetite for 
routine college teaching. Hence it 
happens that a college instructor is 
commissioned to teach boys by reason 
of a proficiency and interest that fre- 
quently unfit him to do that very thing ; 
by reason of a promise whose fulfil- 

quality of the teaching is obvious. It is elsewhere 
assumed in the same report that "teaching and dis- 
covery are both done at their best when done in 
combination." But no one has yet explained why 
the minute investigations of the modern specialist, 
fighting in close quarters for scientific or linguistic 
detail and consequent promotion, constitute him at 
that same moment, the best possible teacher of young 
students, learning and applying general principles. 
There seems to me a distinct antagonism involving 
both the time and the interest of the investigator. 

183 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ment will be balked, if he devotes him- 
self whole-heartedly to the work he is 
ostensibly appointed to do. 

I do not undervalue research; I am 
simply trying to point out that it sets 
up its own conditions and that they are 
by no means always or necessarily 
those that prevail in the region just 
below. Research is a highly special- 
ized activity which for its own sake 
ought to be carefully reserved to stu- 
dents qualified by previous training 
and actual ability. Were I at this 
moment discussing the graduate school 
rather than the college, I could illus- 
trate the folly of loading down gifted 
and promising investigators with an 
exhausting and distasteful college 
routine. It seems to me nothing short 
of absurd to hold that every boy at col- 
lege ought to be stimulated to do "ad- 
184 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

vanced work." His time and energy 
do not suffice for his proper college 
duty. His one piece of research 
means a scrappy addition to an already 
overburdened literature by one who 
cannot thoroughly know what has been 
previously done or the actual bearings 
of what he is supposed to be about. 
Surely for the sake of his single du- 
bious contribution to knowledge it is 
not worth while to select his teachers 
according to graduate school standards. 
The marks of a properly qualified 
college teacher are, on the other hand, 
quite distinctive: he must be a broadly 
trained and broadly minded scholar, 
not necessarily a first-hand investi- 
gator: a purveyor, rehandler, relator, 
rather than a discoverer. His interest 
would usually lie in incorporating 
newly ascertained facts in their con- 
185 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

nections, in correlating, interpreting, 
interrelating data and principles within 
and between various realms: scope, 
sympathy, an active pedagogical con- 
cern should distinguish him. Capacity 
of this kind is not invariably associated 
with the intense and usually narrow 
bent that gives to modern research its 
peculiarly fleshless character. For ex- 
ample: one type of man is well fitted 
to teach boys French: to open up to 
them what is stimulating, suggestive, 
engaging in French literature. A 
totally different type of being delights 
in French phonetics, obscure French 
dialects, etc. The fact that a man 
burns to do the latter, is an excellent 
reason for excusing him from doing 
the former. Once recognize the dif- 
ferentiation and we cease to lament 
that the burden of college routine in- 
186 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

terferes with the professor's original 
work: of course it does; it ought! So 
does the practice of medicine interfere 
with a man's cultivation of medical re- 
search, so does engineering interfere 
with speculation in the domain of elec- 
trical theory. College teaching is a 
practical enterprise, not a side-issue: 
men engaging in it make a choice. 
They do one thing; they forego an- 
other. Very justly they complain if 
they are too busy to keep up with what 
is going on. So too, the physician, 
who is too busy to read his journals, has 
a grievance. The assimilative must 
come in contact with the investigative 
activity ; to some slight extent they may 
overlap. But an effective college can- 
not be organized on the supposition 
that they coincide. 

As a matter of fact, the qualities of 
187 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the college teacher are far more likely 
to protrude hi the secondary than in the 
graduate school. Indeed, no single 
move will go farther towards putting 
college and secondary school on proper 
terms with each other and towards im- 
pregnating both wdth real pedagogical 
interest, than recognition of this fact; 
from tried secondary school men of 
broad and progressive scholarship, the 
college faculty ought to be in part re- 
cruited. Secondary school teaching is 
now a blind alley; it ought to be made 
the avenue to collegiate preferment. 
We should then get secondary school 
teachers upon whom the door of hope 
had not closed, — a wholesome thing for 
them — and college teachers whose posi- 
tion does not mainly depend upon 
doing well something that lies on the 
far side of their daily duty; — a whole- 
188 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

some thing for their pupils. Of 
course, one occasionally finds in a col- 
lege faculty men who have taught in 
the secondary schools. But with very 
few exceptions they did not get their 
college appointments on the basis of 
their secondary school experience; they 
had first to get over that, by enlisting 
in the graduate student army and es- 
tablishing some presumption of talent 
for research! 

The assimilation of the college to 
the graduate school, once fairly started 
in the ways described, travels forward 
rapidly. "Academic freedom" is the 
slogan of investigation. The college 
soon becomes as "academically free" as 
the graduate school. For instance, a 
newly-made Doctor whose personal for- 
tune and interest lie elsewhere is ap- 
pointed to teach college boys; in the 
189 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

name of academic freedom he is turned 
loose in the classroom to "apply his own 
theories and to follow his own bent."^ 
He teaches what and "as he thinks 
fit!" ^ As a result much of the instruc- 
tion given to undergraduates is far too 
highly specialized in content and 
method of presentation to be adapted to 
any but expert use. This difficulty has 
been recognized at Harvard; it cannot 
be remedied except by a thoroughgoing 
reorganization. The committee from 
whose report I have quoted says with 
unconscious irony that the method of 
instruction described "has helped to 
make Harvard College what it is." Is 
it not incredible that such haphazard 
procedure should be seriously put for- 

1 Report of Committee on Instruction in Harvard 
College, p. 11. 

2 President Hadley expresses a similar view, Re- 
port, 1906, p. 10. 

190 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

ward as sound pedagogy? We are 
speaking of boys, whose work must be 
organized. Every step ought to lead 
somewhere; every course is supposed to 
be material to the boy's purpose. Can 
the individual instructor be left free to 
take such account of these facts as he 
pleases, whether in the substance of- 
fered or in the method pursued? The 
subject's bent, the boy's bent, enter 
the calculation ; the instructor's bent has 
little or nothing to do with it. The col- 
lege, academically free, thinks other- 
wise. Every course stands on its own 
bottom; the novice follows his star. It 
is no part of the business of the de- 
partment head closely to organize 
undergraduate instruction, to co-ordin- 
ate courses, to impose standards. His 
intrusion is resented: the instructor's 
classroom is his castle! "The present 
191 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

methods of instruction are in some 
measure determined by department 
policy or are at least in general agree- 
ment with the ideas of the various de- 
partments!"^ *'In some measure, at 
least in general agreement," these 
phrases sum up the degree of co-opera- 
tion within a department, and the de- 
gree of guidance on which the novice 
may count. The unhampered sweep 
that belongs to the investigator is thus 
conferred upon the instructor who 
ought to have a definite task to do, and 
who ought to be held to strict account- 
ability for the way in which it is done. 
A college instructor in English, frank- 
ly confessing himself appalled by the 
difficulties he encountered, told me re- 
cently that no superior officer of his de- 
partment had ever set foot in his class- 

1 Ibid, p. 10. 

192 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

room, that he knew only in a general 
way what other men were doing with 
the problems with which he was eon- 
tending, — that he was, in a word, 
academically free to do what he could 
or would! 

We are in position now to compre- 
hend the vogue of the lecture system. 
It marks one step further in the assimi- 
lation of the college to the graduate 
school. By it the last shackle is struck 
from the college student; thenceforth 
he is in possession of unabridged 
academic freedom. For the lecture 
system — most unqualified in the large 
preliminary courses — totally destroys 
all contact between student and teacher 
at that critical moment when the school- 
boy becomes a college man. There is 
of course another obvious consider- 
ation at work. The colleges are either 
13 193 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

overcrowded or have spent in other 
ways the means that are needed to pro- 
vide thorough fundamental teaching. 
It may, I think, be safely affirmed that, 
if thorough fundamental teaching were 
provided in place of huge inexpensive 
and ineffective general lecture courses, 
the shifting of emphasis together with 
the financial outlay involved would 
bring about an immediate and far- 
reaching reorganization: so true is it 
that advanced work and the graduate 
school have developed, not on the basis 
of, but at the expense of, thorough pre- 
liminary collegiate work. The lecture 
system, however, permits the college to 
handle cheaply by wholesale otherwise 
unmanageable numbers. The lecturer 
presents the subject; it is immaterial to 
how many, so long as his voice fills the 
194 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

auditorium. Relieved of the necessity 
of ascertaining how far ideas are assim- 
ilated, he preserves a portion of his time 
at least for the work on which his stand- 
ing in the world of scholarship and thus 
in the university depends. 

I do not deny that as a method of 
teaching the lecture has its uses. It is 
unsurpassable as a method of orienting 
trained and competent workers in an 
extensive field. There is no better way 
to depict the internal structure, the 
outer connections, of a subject at 
large. So it is employed in the Ger- 
man universities; so it would find a 
place in the final stages of the college 
and in the graduate school. Give a 
trained student just such direction, 
suggestion, stimulus, and he is off. 
But premature, general and indiscrim- 
195 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

inate lecturing defeats the formation of 
the very habits on which successful lec- 
turing presumes. 

The lecture is also well adapted to 
Lyceum duty. There its main pur- 
pose is to lift up heads that the day's 
work bends too inflexibly over the 
craftsman's bench or the accountant's 
desk, in order that a man's eyes may 
traverse the sky or note the changing 
objects on the distant horizon line. 
Impressionability, not scholarship, is 
sought. Doubtless there are realms to 
which even college boys are best intro- 
duced in this way, — but, assuredly, not 
thus is the foundation of their lifework 
to be laid. 

The general lecture courses on which 

the entire superstructure is expected to 

rest are fairly characterized as Lyceum 

courses. They are given by eminent 

196 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

men; they are immensely entertaining, 
authoritative, at times stimulating. It 
is a thrilling experience to hear brilliant 
men sketch a science in bold, quick out- 
lines. But is it good elementary teach- 
ing? Does the boy carry away what 
he needs? Does he get precise notions? 
Is he compelled to think closely? The 
thing is too general, too irresponsible. 
Once more, an astonishing failure in 
pedagogic insight! The mature, set- 
tled graduate student is in the labora- 
tory and seminary in constant contact 
with his teacher. He is at every turn 
accountable; he is mercilessly criticized, 
he is required to define and defend him- 
self, to try conclusions with a kindly 
but inexorable master. The lines are 
tightly held: vagueness, inaccuracy are 
exposed; thoroughness, clearness se- 
cured; indolence, ignorance, misappre- 
197 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

hension get short shrift. If such pro- 
cedure is wholesome and necessary to 
mature minds, what considerations 
make it superfluous for ignorant and 
loosely- jointed boys? 

For all practical purposes the Ameri- 
can college keeps the professor at 
arm's length from the beginner; in the 
more advanced college work, the lec- 
tures are somewhat less formal and are 
at times interrupted by quizzing of a 
kind. But the lack of painstaking 
grounding in the rudiments, and the 
common absence of preparation for 
the day's specific business, go far to 
render the attempt to quiz quite futile. 

The introductory courses seem to me, 
therefore, to furnish the key to this 
situation. To them the boy's slipshod 
conceptions go back; they habituate 
him at the outset to passivity and pro- 
198 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

crastination. From this collapse, the 
college usually seeks an escape through 
a system of assistantships : let us ob- 
serve its operation and outcome/ 

Briefly put, the lecturer lectures, as- 
signs subjects for occasional written 
theses and sets monthly and half-yearly 
examinations; the assistant reads and 
grades the themes and the examination 
papers; besides, once a month he meets 
the students individually for ten or 
fifteen minutes to "talk over their read- 
ing with them, and assists them by ex- 
planation, advice and suggestion." ^ 

1 What 1 have said of the excessive prevalence of 
lectures applies quite commonly to small as well as 
large institutions. Increasing use of lectures is felt 
to mark a college as "grown-up." The extent to 
which assistants are employed and the scope given 
to them is largely a question of the size of classes. 
There is less uniformity in this matter than any- 
where else. The type discussed in the text is, of 
course, confined to some of the most populous institu- 
tions. 

2 Report of Harvard Com. on Improve. Instruct. 
pp. 6, 7. 

199 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

The teacher has thus no necessary com- 
munication with his auditors. To him 
the class is an undifferentiated mass. 
He has no effective way of knowing 
whether his words tell, who works, who 
shirks. He gets no illumination from 
theses and examination papers: he 
never sees either! 

The actual teachers, the men with the 
responsibility to see that the boy under- 
stands and does are the assistants: who 
then are they?^ 

It is difficult to characterize them in 
general terms, for they form a motley 
group. They are for the most part 
meritorious graduate students — 
"Young and therefore without much 
experience in teaching" ^ — who are 

1 Sometimes the lecturing Professor is eliminated ; 
and the fundamental teaching is wholly in the hands 
of assistants of the type described. 

2 Report of Com. on Improv. Instr., pp. 6, 7. 

200 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

earning their way as research workers 
by sacrificing a few hours weekly to 
other uses. Not infrequently an as- 
sistantship is bestowed in order to 
enable a man to continue his pilgrimage 
to the Ph.D. degree; often, the assist- 
ant is a Ph.D. of recent origin — a 
fledgling not quite ready to fly or with- 
out a place to fly to. Two features 
stand out: the transitoriness of the 
body, its absorption in graduate aims. 
Can a changing body of more or less 
inexperienced young men, with no real 
stake attached to the performance of a 
perfunctory and underpaid incidental 
occupation, each of them simultaneous- 
ly busy upon really congenial tasks to 
which a twenty-four hour day is at best 
inadequate, — can a body so constituted, 
I ask, efl*ectively mediate between the 
lecturer and his class? I am exceed- 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

ingly anxious to be fair to the assistant, 
however severely I comment on the sys- 
tem; but my impression is that they 
regard their duties as an interruption, 
— a deplorable, unavoidable interrup- 
tion, doomed to futility at that. 

Let us follow the working of this 
system in a concrete case.^ The sub- 
ject will probably be entirely new to 
the freshman, and certainly not easy. 
For a general outline of the entire field 
— ^the basis on which all subsequent 
work rests — the college provides a 
course of lectures given three times 
weekly for a half-year: forty or fifty 
lectures distributed over some three 

1 1 discuss here the Harvard method of employing 
assistants; other methods are in vogue at other large 
institutions. But the particular method is of little 
consequence. The entire practice of delegating im- 
portant fundamental teaching to hard-pressed stu- 
dents working for advanced degrees is, in my judg- 
ment, indefensible. 

202 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

months. The lecturer suggests the use 
of a general handbook to accompany 
the course, — he does not, however, fol- 
low closely its order or adhere strictly 
to its views; from time to time more 
definite recommendations as to addi- 
tional reading are made for the eluci- 
dation of special points. Now then, 
all that the college does to make sure 
that the boy can do and is doing his 
work is once a month to give him a ten 
or fifteen minute interview with an as- 
sistant of the quahfications just des- 
cribed! During this month something 
like one-third of the whole field has 
been traversed in the lectures; the es- 
sential basic facts, concepts and prob- 
lems stated and discussed; at its close 
an assistant meets the beginner for a 
quarter of an hour to test his know- 
ledge, explain away his difficulties, and 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

direct his stumbling footsteps for the 
next thirty days! Not a single lecture 
but raised more difficulties than can be 
cleared up intelligently in the time al- 
lotted to the crop of an entire month! 

Occasionally the work is somewhat 
differently organized. Lectures are 
given only twice weekly. In the third 
hour, an assistant meets a section of 
some thirty or forty students, so select- 
ed that each student attends one such 
meeting monthly. But neither ar- 
rangement is intimate enough to be ef- 
ficient. A good teacher of boys in a 
fundamental course must have his 
hand on his pupil's pulse; no lecturer 
can hear answers through an assistant's 
ears or read theses through an assist- 
ant's eyes. Finally, the time allowance 
is frankl}^ ridiculous, — call it fifteen 
minutes monthly for each boy, or fifty 
204 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

minutes monthly for a section of forty. 
The most expert assistant cannot break 
ground in such conditions. I know an 
assistant who, utterly desperate, con- 
fers in writing. He sets a few simple 
questions, having answered which the 
boy departs. The fact is that the ice is 
thin and one must skate warily. The 
assistants cannot afford by fearless 
quizzing, to expose the shallowness and 
superficiality in which such instruction 
necessarily eventuates; they cannot, by 
applying strict standards, permit the 
students to throw the responsibility 
where it belongs. The standard is thus 
necessarily low.^ 

Naturally enough, these conditions 

1 The passing mark is usually 50% and the mark- 
ing is, as a rule, lenient. The Harvard committee 
already quoted admits that the amount of study in 
the undergraduate department is "discreditably 
small." 

205 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

put an end to systematic study. The 
professor does not know what is going 
on; the transient youthful instructor 
who represents him lacks compelling 
authority. There is thus no pretence 
that the student keeps pace with the 
lecturer by concurrent reading or 
studying. As a rule, lecture notes and 
required reading silently accumulate 
until an imminent conference or exam- 
ination looms on the horizon. Then 
there is a vigorous rattling of dry 
bones ; a sudden flare of energy ; a hasty 
session with an expert crammer ; a quick 
skirmish with books of reference. A 
well-known professor told me that he 
entered the faculty resolved to break 
up this practice. He determined to 
quiz his students for a few moments at 
every meeting on the subject of the 
previous lecture before going on to de- 
206 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

velop it further. Surely, an eminently 
sensible procedure. Well, he was un- 
able to persevere. The current was too 
strong for him. Only concerted and 
fearless action on the part of the entire 
faculty could carry through so radical 
a departure, and of such action there 
was no hope. It continues generally 
impossible to require college students 
even to read their notes between lec- 
tures. Plainly a loss of dignity, a re- 
turn to the outgrown ways of the sec- 
ondary school is involved in "studying 
one's lessons !" 

Quite recently Princeton has won 
honorable distinction through an inde- 
pendent experiment in this field. In 
each of several departments, preceptors 
or tutors have been put in charge of 
small groups, with whom they meet in- 
formally and intimately. The tutor is 
207 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

not, however, expected to go over the 
ground covered by the professor in his 
lectures. The tutor's work rather sup- 
plements or illustrates the general lec- 
tures. The professor thus continues 
to expound principles which, in that 
form, the boy may, or may not, grasp. 
The tutor, without any direct responsi- 
bility on this score, reads with his small 
group additional or illustrative mater- 
ial. Unquestionably the tutors do on 
this arrangement enjoy a genuine ped- 
agogical opportunity. But I cannot 
see that the system offers any assurance 
of a sound or adequate sub-structure. 
The professor's lectures must still be 
regarded as the backbone of the depart- 
mental work, and only the examination 
determines whether the student has 
properly apprehended them. If not, 
208 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

it is then too late to do anything but 
register his failure/ 

Decided sagacity has been displayed 
in some institutions by the students in 
perfecting their own machine. The 
logic of the thing runs thus : Survival 
is essentially a question of passing a 
regular succession of examinations. 
No concurrent preparation of work is 
required; no tests are sprung. An 
easy standard acquits the student who 
has paid with decent regularity the 
perfunctory tribute of attendance at 

1 1 should add that the preceptor ranks decidedly 
higher than the assistant in dignity and salary; his 
grade is practically equivalent to that of assistant 
professor. The reader will find the aims and opera- 
tion of the system discussed in President Wilson's 
recent reports. It is claimed that it has already ef- 
fected a marked improvement in the attitude of the 
student in respect to his work. It will be interesting 
to observe how the attitude and efforts of the pre- 
ceptors are affected by the growth of Princeton's 
graduate school. 

14 209 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

lectures. Now, in periods varying 
from a single hour to several days, an 
expert tutor can train almost any sort 
of student to clear the barriers; the 
process is entirely mechanical. Ex- 
perts in this line will undertake to train 
a color-blind man to pass the railroad 
color tests without in the least actually 
improving his defective color sense! 

This industry is mainly concentrated 
in the hands of a small group of keen 
business men, not overladen with either 
scruples or scholarship. They take 
into their service on commission as 
many graduate students as the traffic 
requires. Here at least is a teaching 
staiF, running parallel with the college 
catalogue. The business has grown 
to enormous proportions. A few years 
ago an instructor who described him- 
self "as having gone every gait at col- 
210 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

lege" assured me that in his college 
thousands upon thousands of dollars 
change hands annually in the course of 
this illicit commerce; that no small part 
of it comes from students whose "nec- 
essary" expenses are met by painful 
sacrifices at home. The methods em- 
ployed are explicitly adapted to the im- 
mediate ends for which the service is 
sought: — the adroit and painless ad- 
ministration of minimum doses of pre- 
digested lore. Through personal at- 
tendance on the lectures or through an 
agent, the tutor gets possession of the 
material. He casts it into easily assim- 
ilable shape; danger and the boy's gen- 
uine absorptive capacity — which the 
college persistently underrates — do the 
rest. Nor does the trade confine itself 
to "talking" subjects — literature, phil- 
osophy, government, in which fluency, 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

self-possession and a fact or two may- 
make a brave show. I have met suc- 
cessful instances of this death-bed treat- 
ment in highly technical courses: — 
cryptogamic botany, musical theory, 
and physics, in some of which a highly 
intricate terminology learnt for the first 
time the night before examination 
weathered a final three hour test next 
day. The lecturers themselves rarely 
appreciate the extent to which fraud 
and evasion flourish; but the assistants 
who read the papers mark the suspi- 
cious sameness of the waters that flow 
from one tutorial font. For the help- 
lessness of the college in this situation, 
the fatal division of authority between 
lecturer and assistant is primarily res- 
ponsible. 

Before leaving this subject, I must 
S12 



GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE 

make it plain that I am condemning a 
system, not men: the efforts of the 
teaching staff to work an unworkable 
machine, though unavailing, are unre- 
mitting. They are caught between 
absolutely inconsistent necessities. 
They can neither teach deliberately nor 
investigate composedly. The system 
is hard on the boys, it is tragic for the 
men who must administer it.. They are 
both overworked and underpaid.^ For 
the love of learning they have fore- 
sworn worldly careers, with all the sac- 
rifices for themselves and their families 
therein involved. And now in lieu of 

1 The financial status of the American professor 
and instructor is exhaustively set forth and most 
luminously discussed in Bulletin Number Two of 
the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of 
Teaching. I regret that its publication comes too 
late to permit me to profit by its contents; the 
facts that it assembles and interprets throw a flood 
of light on the problems of university organization. 

213 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the opportunity they sought they must 
accept a wretched compromise, equally 
fatal to good teaching and to unfetter- 
ed research. 



gl4 



CHAPTER VI 

THE WAY OUT 

MY position thus far may be brief- 
ly summarized as follows: The 
American college is wisely committed 
to a broad and flexible scheme of higher 
education through which each indi- 
vidual may hope to procure the train- 
ing best calculated to realize his maxi- 
mum effectiveness. The scheme fails 
for lack of sufficient insight : in the first 
place, because the preparatory school 
routine devised by the college sup- 
presses just what the college assumes 
that it will develop ; in the second place, 
because of the chaotic condition of the 
college curriculum; finally, because re- 
215 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

search has largely appropriated the re- 
sources of the college, substituting the 
methods and interest of highly special- 
ized investigation for the larger objects 
of college teaching. 

The way out lies, as I see it, through 
the vigorous reassertion of the priority 
of the college as such. The point of 
emphasis must be shifted back. There 
is the meat of the whole problem. 
Historically Yale, Columbia, Harvard, 
Princeton are colleges. The B. A., not 
the Ph.D. is, and has always been, the 
college man. The college has been 
richly endowed. And it is the college, 
where a boy may be trained in serious- 
ness of interest and mastery of power, 
that the nation pre-eminently needs. 
The graduate school is a late develop- 
ment: a proper beneficiary of the col- 
lege surplus, if such there be, not the 
216 



THE WAY OUT 

legitimate appropriator of the lion's 
share of its revenues. 

I mean neither to depreciate nor to 
disparage graduate work ; to the extent 
of advocating a more exclusive treat- 
ment of its privileges, a more thorough 
fitness for its opportunities, I am doing 
just the reverse. But I insist that 
rapidly won distinction as research cen- 
tres is no compensation for college 
failure. The diversion of college 
resources to graduate uses is defensible 
on the theory that college work is anti- 
quated or superfluous : but this plea can 
hardly be urged, at a time when the 
graduate schools themselves suffer 
from slighted college work. Its neg- 
lect of its primary duty in favor of 
wider adventure subjects the college 
to exactly the same criticism and dis- 
aster that befall a merchant whose capi- 
211 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

tal is inadequate to the scale on which 
his imagination and ambition lead him 
to do business. 

I suspect that the moment the dis- 
tinctively educational function is 
strongly emphasized it will become evi- 
dent that the college is nowadays edu- 
cationally headless. The two officials 
nominally responsible for its direction 
lack time and scope. The President of 
the University is too busy and remote; 
his duties are executive, administrative, 
financial, representative. His inter- 
ests and activities are necessarily less 
and less pedagogical; his contact with 
students, class-rooms, instructors, prac- 
tically nil. The college dean, who 
takes his place, lacks pedagogical au- 
thority. His office has become increas- 
ingly clerical, hortatory and punitive. 
He is the keeper of the records, the 
218 



THE WAY OUT 

interpreter of statistics, the chief pro- 
bation officer. His intercourse with 
the individual student tends to be con- 
ditioned on the latter's delinquency. 
The boy who fulfils the minimum re- 
quirement is let alone. In any event, 
the dean's relations are with students 
only; over instructors or instruction, he 
has no real authority and no great in- 
fluence. He is not appointed to the 
deanship by reason of pedagogical 
eminence. He is only a professor, de- 
tached for a while from his depart- 
ment because he happens to add execu- 
tive ability and tact to the prevailing 
type of scholarship. The dean is not 
then fitted by the range of his acquire- 
ments or by distinctively pedagogical 
interest for the task of supervising the 
college organization and procedure. 
Either then the deanship must be re- 
^19 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

constituted or a new office, say the 
principalship, be created. Not other- 
wise will the teaching function, as 
such, get adequate recognition. It 
certainly can get no such recognition 
from the department heads among 
whom it is now loosely scattered. 
These scholars and scientists are not 
going voluntarily to concede that the 
college interest is either distinct from, 
or prior to, or inconsistent with the in- 
terest of research. Left to themselves, 
as to a large extent they now are, they 
will continue to develop their depart- 
ments in the research sense. They will 
proceed further on the theory that ele- 
mentary teaching and special research 
"are both best done when done to- 
gether," even when the teaching is lit- 
erature, and the research philology or 
phonetics; that all new Ph.D's are ipso 
220 



THE WAY OUT 

facto qualified to teach "what and as 
they think fit," during the period of 
incubation, when the university keeps 
them under observation to find out 
whether they will make good as investi- 
gators; finally, that the personal predi- 
lections of the scholars who constitute 
a department are bound automatically 
to provide just the courses that an un- 
dergraduate is in search of. Now, at 
every one of these points sharp em- 
phasis of the college point of view will 
develop a conflict between the need of 
the boy and the procedure of the in- 
vestigator. And for this reason: in 
the higher reaches of a fertile subject, 
where the investigator is busy, there are 
innumerable points of departure. It 
is practically immaterial where investi- 
gation begins; every trail leads some- 
where. But at the lower level, that of 
^^1 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

the college boy, this is by no means the 
case. There, some things are more im- 
portant than others; there, co-ordina- 
tion within each subject, and between 
subjects that support and interpret 
each other, is indispensable, if the be- 
ginner is to achieve solid comprehen- 
sion. Now this sort of thing does not 
take place automatically and incident- 
ally, while the several instructors are 
pursuing their favorite scents. On the 
contrary, courses must be selected, 
mapped out, and conducted with the re- 
quirements of the student distinctly in 
mind. 

The next move must be in the direc- 
tion of reconstructing the preparatory 
school. As things now stand, the col- 
lege is in fact the main hindrance to the 
vital, pedagogical treatment of the 
secondary period. External pressure 
222 



THE WAY OUT 

has failed to make the preparatory- 
school effective. A totally different 
conception must be introduced into the 
relations between the secondary school 
and the college. They must become 
continuous where now they fall apart. 
The motive on which the college vainly 
relies, self-realization, has got to be ren- 
dered operative at the earlier stage. 
As a matter of fact, the secondary 
period is far more favorable than the 
college to free exploration of the boy. 
In college, the proximity of the practi- 
cal ends which loom up just ahead con- 
trols the situation. Imminent vocation- 
al or professional necessities should 
there largely determine both the content 
of the curriculum and the form of the 
instruction. In the secondary school, 
however, the material can be much more 
freely handled. It can be more 
223 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

readily derived from, less pedantically 
connected with, the boy's experience. 
Moreover the boy is himself more trac- 
table. Early adolescence is a period of 
natural expansion, quick appreciation, 
ready responsiveness. It is preem- 
inently the time for the liberation and 
recognition of the boy's power and pur- 
pose. 

Reform of the preparatory school in 
this direction would require the tran- 
sition to college to be less mechanically 
regulated. The examination system 
cannot be at once wiped out; but it can 
be gradually reconstituted. Entrance 
to college can, whenever the colleges so 
desire, be treated as a privilege. The 
range, seriousness and cohesiveness of 
previous study may be made the main 
factor in deciding to which of the ex- 
cessive number of applicants further 
224 



THE WAY OUT 

opportunity shall be extended. The 
College Entrance Board might readily 
be converted into an instrumentality for 
the ascertaining of these really vital 
facts. 

Assuming now that the secondary 
school has actually laid bare the indi- 
vidual, has started up vital and charac- 
teristic activities, the college has some- 
thing to build on. The elective system 
— for the time being I retain the name 
— becomes capable of intelligent appli- 
cation. The youth chooses; he selects 
or is effectively assisted to select his 
status. The college must then organ- 
ize for him the intermediate steps to his 
chosen end. For this purpose it is 
worse than useless to maintain a diffuse 
and practically endless course of study. 
A compact, related and organized body 
of instruction in each of the fields 
15 225 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

which the college undertakes to cover, 
must be substituted for the disjecta 
membra of the present catalogue. 
Only in the very last stages can the 
undergraduate be credited with the 
knowledge necessary to a prudent 
choice between highly specialized alter- 
natives. Seminary and research courses 
must be closed, not only to undergrad- 
uates, but to graduates, whose slender 
acquisitions require them still to re- 
pair to undergraduate classes. We 
shall thus have seen the last of two ab- 
surd phenomena now frequently ob- 
served: the undergraduate student, 
who, in default of thorough fundamen- 
tal training, has prematurely escaped 
into a narrow research, which, whether 
worth doing or not, is not worth his do- 
ing then ; and the mature graduate who 
takes part in an advanced seminary, 
226 



THE WAY OUT 

while simultaneously making up funda- 
mental deficiencies by attending ele- 
mentary courses. 

With the definite realization that the 
undergraduate comes to college in 
search of teaching in the pregnant 
sense of the word, other changes will 
take place. For example, the Fresh- 
man may there renew acquaintance 
with a teacher who won his spurs in a 
secondary school. Again, college teach- 
ing will do its painstaking piecework 
at the beginning of a new subject, in- 
stead of as now, only in the later and 
last stages, after wretched preliminary 
teaching, rather than demonstrated in- 
capacity or uncongeniality has thinned 
out the ranks, and thus limited the size 
of the more advanced classes. The 
middleman, whether he be the changing 
assistant, detailed by the college, or the 
227 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

tutor hired by the boy, must be abso- 
lutely eliminated. The college pro- 
fessor will not only offer courses, but 
teach. I happen to know one, who, de- 
spite large classes, so construed his 
duty. His predecessor in the chair had 
lectured; unofficial quiz-masters did the 
rest at ten dollars per head. The new 
appointee declared war on the system; 
he frankly stated that he would put the 
knife into every examination paper 
that smacked of eleventh-hour cram. 
He proposed to do his own quizzing; 
twice weekly he would meet any stu-. 
dents who cared to come for the pur- 
pose. The consternation of the first 
moments soon gave way to concurrent 
and energetic preparation. In time, 
practically every member of the class 
took part in the optional quiz. A genu- 
228 



THE WAY OUT 

ine outburst of energy and productivity- 
contrasted sharply with the previous 
sterihty of the department. At the 
same time, the instructor in question 
was an original producer of distinction. 
He found that his teaching, once ra- 
tionally organized, left him a respecta- 
ble amount of time for his own re- 
searches. 

Finally, emphasis of the teaching 
motive will put an end to commercial- 
ism. On this point plain speech is nec- 
essary. Efficient teaching is utterly 
irreconcilable with numerical and com- 
mercial standards of success. The col- 
leges now want numbers; they must 
have and keep them, more or less re- 
gardless of quality. So elaborate are 
their equipments and appointments, so 
costly the maintenance of the plant. 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

that a temporary fluctuation in tuition 
fees is a serious matter/ There arises 
thus a spirited competition for students. 
The various offices scrutinize the num- 
bers of incoming classes as narrowly as 
a merchant watches his daily sales. 
They send out drummers who beat up 
recruits and the credit man at home can- 
not be over-squeamish about accepting 
and carrying business thus obtained. 
This is the logic of the situation, from 
which there is no escape. A high stan- 
dard is incompatible with acute sensi- 
tiveness to the reading of the trade 

1 "In spite of the great additions to the college's 
invested property, it appears that at present a larger 
proportion of its unrestricted income is derived from 
tuition fees than formerly, and this means that any 
falling of in number of students affects more di- 
rectly the ability of the college to maintain its 
necessary expenditure without harmful retrench- 
ments." The University During the Last Twenty- 
five Years," William Coolidge Lane, p. 5. (Italics 
mine). 

S30 



THE WAY OUT 

barometer. Nor can the college solicit 
on one basis and then exclude on an- 
other. It cannot put loyalty, tradition, 
athletics to the fore and then, when the 
clans gather, subject them to stringent 
tests of scholarly character. The col- 
lege has thus tied its own hands. It 
cannot on existing lines effectively han- 
dle the students it has assembled ; it can- 
not afford to apply methods or enforce 
standards that threaten the present en- 
rolment. 

So far, propositions that endeavor to 
face this problem have looked at it 
from the administrative or social side. 
Now the administrative problem may 
perhaps be solved by sub-dividing the 
over-grown college into several bodies, 
each in charge of its own dean; the so- 
cial problem may be solved by housing 
the students in residential halls of the 
2Sl 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

Oxford type. But these devices do not 
touch the pedagogical problem : as long 
as all these sub-divisions merge without 
restriction as to total number in the lec- 
ture rooms and laboratories, contact be- 
tween teacher and pupil is made impos- 
sible. The pedagogical problem is 
soluble only on the basis of a reasonably 
limited enrolment and the proffer of 
such courses only as the institution can 
afford to conduct without so far rely- 
ing on fees that it must to a degree 
waive standards and ideals in order to 
get students. A comparatively simple 
calculation will discover how many stu- 
dents a college can, with its existing 
financial resources and laboratory facil- 
ities, teach; not admit and handle, but 
actually teach. It must admit no more. 
In selecting its material, it is then in 
position to go back of the mechanical 
232 



THE WAY OUT 

examination returns, in order to ascer- 
tain whether the candidate is otherwise 
quahfied to use the opportunities of- 
fered. How far beyond this point 
it can indulge the propensity for re- 
search, is something for subsequent con- 
sideration. Our output in the matter 
of investigation would indisputably in- 
crease in value and decrease in bulk, if 
the unflinching execution of the policy 
here urged should result in improving 
the efliciency of the colleges through 
lopping off entirely some of the gradu- 
ate schools.^ The college can be in 

1 It seems to me, for instance, that nothing is 
gained for research, and a good deal is lost for 
education, through the maintenance of graduate de- 
partments in colleges exclusively for women. Women 
are now admitted on equal terms with men to all 
graduate departments. The resources of our col- 
leges for women are at best slender. Why should a 
considerable portion of them be taken away from 
the primary and unique object for which these col- 
leges exist, in order to duplicate inadequately other 
opportunities that are already super-abundant? 

263 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

close touch with the progress of knowl- 
edge without housing a graduate school 
beneath its roof. 

Thus far my suggestions are capable 
of adoption without interference with 
any college as a "going" concern. But 
now I must point out that these sug- 
gestions do not exhaust our need and 
opportunity. It is, therefore, pro- 
foundly to be hoped that the reform 
movement may be accelerated, guided 
and carried further through independ- 
ent demonstration outside the walls of 
existing institutions. I submit that at' 
this juncture, increasing the resources 
of our present schools and colleges so 
as to enable them to do "more," does 
not best serve the interests of American 
education. Its urgent need is of insti- 
tutions of different type; institutions 
that, as over against the great educa- 
234; 



THE WAY OUT 

tional factories, that meet the demand 
of the market, will embody the tenta- 
tive enquiring spirit of the laboratory, 
where amidst simplified conditions, 
problems now glossed over may be at- 
tacked on their merits. Many such 
problems have been touched on in the 
course of these pages. The distrac- 
tions due to expanding numbers and 
clashing ideals, have forced our hand 
in dealing with them. The situation 
has crystallized far too quickly; admin- 
istrative necessity prevents it from now 
being completely broken up. Every 
institution has its recognized place in 
the elaborate and complicated system. 
The whole machine would be thrown 
out of gear by an experiment that, for 
example, undertook at once radically to 
readjust the present distribution of ed- 
ucational functions. It is nevertheless 
235 



THE AMERICAN COLLEGE 

perfectly clear that this distribution is 
largely an historic accident ; that a com- 
plete change of educational purpose has 
not yet found expression in the spirit, 
subject-matter, methods and organiza- 
tion of the curriculum. This is in the 
first place especially unfortunate, in re- 
spect to the secondary period. The 
secondary school is the key to the col- 
lege position. On the vigor and intelli- 
gence of the secondary school, the 
permanent solution of college problems 
now depends. How can we decide the 
length, organization, content of a col- 
lege course until we have in some sort 
mapped out, on the basis of successful 
experiment, the territory that can be 
covered in the secondary school? A 
splendid opportunity thus awaits a 
school outside the present system. Such 
an institution would furnish sugges- 
236 



THE WAY OUT 

tions, models and standards to schools, 
not so circumstanced as to carry on 
educational experimentation. It would 
provide the college, the technical 
school, the professional schools with a 
scientifically determined point of de- 
parture; a definite basis upon which 
they could securely and intelligently 
proceed. There is no such basis now; 
nor within the established system can it 
be worked out in a scientific way. 



THE END 



237 



f <r 



J 6^ 
X I a 



1 ( 



